U.S. Treasury Cracks down on Russian Crypto Miners, While Bitcoin sees a decline in the last 24 hours

Weekly Update

Following hawkish remarks from the Federal Reserve, which is planning fast rate hikes, major crypto coins were trading down on Friday. All major crypto tokens were trading lower in the early hours of Friday, with the exception of the dollar-pegged USD Coins. Solana dropped 4%, while Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB, Dogecoin, Luna, and Avalanche all dropped 3%.

Bitcoin stayed above $40,000 for the day, but was down over 2%, according to the statistics. Bitcoin had fallen 1.85% in the last 24 hours to trade at $40,726.59. However, over the last seven days, Bitcoin price was up by 1.39%.

The global cryptocurrency market was down by 1.53% in the last 24 hours to $1.89 trillion, as per data from CoinMarketCap.

Sanctions on Russia

According to the University of Cambridge, Russia is the third-largest bitcoin miner in the world, and the US Treasury Department issued a press statement on April 20, 2022, announcing fresh sanctions aimed at bitcoin mining in Russia in response to their ongoing war in Ukraine.

According to the Treasury Department, Russia’s reliance on fiat payments and the importation of computer equipment puts it at risk of penalties if the US concentrates on the companies who provide such services.

The US Treasury opted to use different attack vectors that damage the supply chain because government bodies cannot stop the actual operation of mining bitcoin. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US government added Russian crypto mining business BitRiver to its sanctions list on Wednesday as part of its ongoing campaign to ban Russian firms from accessing the global financial network.

These sanctions have been imposed on Russia in response to the ongoing war against Ukraine, and will not affect remote mining operations with us.