Russia blocks crypto exchange OKX without disclosing reason

Russia blocked global crypto exchange company OKX on Oct. 4 without disclosing why, according to News of Finance.

A local non-governmental organization named Roskomsvoboda discovered that the Prosecutor General’s office blacklisted okx.com’s IP address on Tuesday. The banning decision was made based on article 15.3 of the Federal Law on the Information, Information Technologies, and Protection of Information.

Reason for the ban

The Prosecutor General’s office didn’t disclose why and how OKX breached article 15.3 of the Federal Law. It is known that this law focuses on public calls for extremist activities.

Roskomsvoboda’s founder Artem Kozlyuk commented on the discovery and said that often times the companies that are blocked don’t know the reason. The only way to figure out why is to file a lawsuit against Roskomnadzor, Russia’s internet censorship agency.

OKX

According to Coingecko, OKX’s daily trading volume is nearly $1.4 billion and it is the third largest crypto exchange platform by market cap. However, this didn’t prevent Russian authorities from banning the exchange.

Russia also banned Binance‘s website in June 2021, saying that the exchange was operating in a fully decentralized manner, which left no room for the government to regulate Binance’s actions, which was against Russian laws at the time. Binance answered with a lawsuit, saying that it didn’t receive any complaints from the regulators and got the ban lifted by the court in January.

OKX, on the other hand, didn’t comment on the recent ban. Considering Kozlyuk’s comments, chances are that OKX is unaware of the recent decision.

The exchange’s name came out recently in relation to the Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon case. On Sept. 28, South Korean authorities asked KuCoin and OKX to freeze 3,313 Bitcoins (BTC) because Kın had allegedly moved 3313 Bitcoins to these exchanges to sell.