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What's going on here, first DuckDuckGone and now this? Are all these "hey come support us so we can grow and be better than the established big tech" startups just as bad as the rest? It's almost as if all they needed was a large client base and enough recognition to then show they are actually not al that different than centralized exchanges or search engines. OPENSEA has gone to even further lengths by publicly announcing to be banning millions of people purely based on nationality, but METAMASK was supposedly one of the largest safe havens and trustworthy wallets for people who still wanted to interact with crypto and connect to other platforms without being discriminated against solely because of where they are from.
But there's a lot more than initially meets the eye here, MetaMask themselves didn't suddenly decide to block users, but them being one of the most used wallets it's safe to say this is a very bad look for crypto and decentralization, especially to newcomers. I mean, all this time we've been saying to people "hey, make sure you hold your private keys and that it's decentralized" and already faced a gazillion questions on why they should do so or what the difference is between that and their BINANCE "wallet". How are we to explain to the few who did get it up till now, to also take RPC, nodes and Infura into account? "Hey make sure the decentralized app or non custodial wallet where you have your private keys is not based in the United States and is also not relying on Infura to connect to the blockchain, or better yet, just run your own node". Yeah, that'll do wonders for mass adoption and will definitely pass 'the grandma test' alright????
Yes there are of course ways to get around the now inaccessible MetaMask wallets, yes your funds are still available and not "confiscated" since you have your seed (or at least I hope you do), yes there are alternatives to OpenSea but these things are not only hampering mass adoption, this raises a far bigger question: Is the whole crypto revolution dying? Have we been hijacked by those who do not understand nor care why Bitcoin exists in the first place?
As stated in the title OpenSea is the top used app on Ethereum and MetaMask one of the most popular wallets so this is actually a much bigger deal than most care to admit, and to repeat a key phrase from previous posts again, don't think it can't happen to you! Anyone who is remotely aware of how singling out or censorship played itself out in the past will recognize the patterns here. This is how it , this is not where it
and OpenSea blame the US sanctions for this, but this is the WWW, not USW. The cited sanctions imposed by Washington are illegitimate to international law. Have we reached a point were crypto went from "decentralized and trust less peer-to-peer finance" to "appeasing fascism and abiding by lawlessness"?
Infura tried to do some damage control btw as many started to regain access to their MetaMask funds and say "False alarm people, settle down, it was just a tiny oversight from our part", but that didn't go down so well as many could already see the writing on the wall:
I'm sorry to sound rather harsh, especially regarding MetaMask since they really didn't have much say in everything that went down recently, but if these institutions can not be trusted to maintain their integrity and along the way compromise their users from entire countries today due to domestic pressure and certain blockchain hosts, users from other countries (e.g. Russia, China) are on the list tomorrow. And it doesn't end there, what makes you think that if an e.g. France or Canada wants to crack down on protesters and already proven to go to extremes regarding bank accounts and even , won't start making their demands to these institutions next? Those that thought the fight was over are in for a rude awakening. Hacks, wars, sanctions, cyberwarfare, market manipulations, censorship: The crypto revolution and decentralization are truly being tested now on multiple levels.
