The cryptocurrency industry’s sanctions woes are on full display in MetaMask’s Venezuela incident

<p>MetaMask and Infura enraged Crypto Twitter by inadvertently censoring some users in order to comply with new US restrictions. </p> <p>Crypto observers were outraged Thursday after rumours on Reddit appeared that MetaMask, many people's entry point into the world of Ethereum, had been made inaccessible to users in Venezuela. </p> <p>According to a series of tweets, Infura, the infrastructure firm also owned by Ethereum company ConsenSys, enforced new geoblocks on Thursday but applied them too liberally. </p> <p>The error had been corrected, according to Infura, but not before critics claimed that the experience demonstrated a flaw in what is widely touted as the "uncensorable" internet. </p> <p>"Infura closely monitors changes to US sanctions programmes issued by the Office of Foreign Assets Control and tightly tailors its internal procedures to comply with the law," a ConsenSys spokeswoman said in an email to CoinDesk. "At the moment, those regions are Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, and Ukraine's Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions." </p> <p>The ban of these places comes as regulators increase their inspection of the crypto industry's compliance with sanctions imposed by the United States and other national authorities against Russian businesses. Regulators and lawmakers, including US Senator Elizabeth Warren and German Finance Minister Christian Lindner, have expressed worry that cryptocurrency may be used to undermine sanctions. Exchanges, for example, have stated that they will block sanctioned individuals, but they have not, on the whole, blocked entire countries. </p> <p>By design, MetaMask connects to the Ethereum blockchain via Infura. MetaMask's default endpoints, unless changed by users, make it vulnerable to Infura's geographic no-go zones. </p> <p>Crypto On Thursday, Twitter was reminded of this fact when Infura accidentally cast a dragnet that was too wide. Rumors circulated about a total blockade of Venezuela; pundits falsely claimed that MetaMask had been banned in a country where crypto