According to the company’s terms of service, people and organizations from sanctioned regions are not allowed to use OpenSea’s platform.
OpenSea, a platform for nonfungible tokens (NFTs), has banned artists and collectors from going to Cuba, mainly because of US sanctions.
A report from Artnet says that 30 artists and collectors have not been allowed to use the popular NFT marketplace so far. Gabriel Guerra Bianchini and Fábrica de Arte Cubano, both from Havana, were two of the best-known artists who lost their jobs.
In its terms of service, OpenSea makes it clear that sanctioned people and people from sanctioned countries are not allowed to use it. The fact that the NFT marketplace followed US sanctions was well known, and countries like Venezuela, Iran, and Syria were among those that did so. But since Cuban musicians are now banned, the country is also on that list.
“We continue to look at the big picture to see what extra steps we need to take to serve our community and follow the law,” an OpenSea representative told Cointelegraph.
Earlier in December, a Twitter account called NFT Cuba Work said that OpenSea had stopped them from viewing or listing their art, but they could still use their wallets. Erich Garca Cruz, the founder of Bit Remasa, said that their NFT collections were also against the law. Gabriel Bianchini, the founder of Cryptocuban, says that the future of Web3 does not look like it will be decentralized.
long time since we posted, unfortunate that this post needs to be this.@opensea has disabled our profile.
— NFTcuba.ART
Not only do Cubans on the island, but those who have other nationalities have to endure censorship in web3 company.
Buying art from Cubans is not banned in the us embargo pic.twitter.com/7cccbmjNWR(@nftcubaart) December 12, 2022
Aside from OpenSea, other crypto platforms had to stop serving Russian customers because of new restrictions put in place by the European Union after the war in Ukraine broke out earlier this year.
Even though the bitcoin ecosystem is based on the idea of decentralization, most of the middlemen and organizations that make different services possible still run like most centralized Web2 companies.
The crypto community was unhappy with the auctions on the NFT marketplace and wanted them to stop. Someone else said that there needs to be real decentralized systems that don’t care about countries.
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