The USA has replenished the SDN-List with new Russian IT companies
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The United States has imposed blocking sanctions against a number of Russian IT companies, including the organizers of DFA placements – Atomize, Lighthouse, and Masterchain. In general, operators do not see risks to their work because they operate within the country. But experts admit that difficulties may arise when interacting with foreign partners, legal and technological risks, and the impossibility of using international blockchains.
USA on March 25 included in SDN-List three Russian information system operators (OIS) that host digital financial assets (DFAs) – Atomize, Lighthouse and Masterchain. In total, ten OIS operate in the Russian Federation, some of which are, to one degree or another, connected with banks that are already under US sanctions.
The companies themselves emphasize that their DFAs are purely domestic instruments. Atomize assured that “the restrictions introduced do not affect the operation of the platform in any way.” Deputy General Director of Masterchain Maxim Tishchenko admitted that against the backdrop of the introduction of sanctions, a number of clients “may have questions,” but the company has already worked with sanctioned clients, so “it does not see any particular risks.” According to him, MasterChain’s work did not involve foreign transactions. Lighthouse declined to comment.
At the same time, the experts interviewed by Kommersant are more cautious. According to Pavel Fedorov, CEO and founder of the tokenization platform Fractio, for OIC “legal risks may be realized that will limit any interaction of the management team and owners of such organizations with any organizations or countries and the right to purchase assets there or open deposits in banks.” In addition, according to the expert, bans on the supply and use of technologies or hardware infrastructure are possible. A member of the expert council of the working group on cryptocurrencies of the State Duma of the Russian Federation, Mikhail Uspensky, however, claims that most DFA operators operate on their own blockchains and “local equipment.”
At the same time, Mr. Uspensky names “censoring of transactions” among the risks.
The expert explained that in order to attract liquidity, Russian platforms “will be forced to introduce so-called bridges into international blockchains.” The United States can force “miners and validators to block transactions associated with “bridges”, transitions from Russian blockchains to international ones.”
At the beginning of March, the President of the Russian Federation just signed a law on the use of digital financial services in international payments. “The logic of sanctions against companies working with digital assets is quite clear – the United States continues to limit the ways in which the Russian Federation and Russian persons can make payments,” says Delcredere lawyer Artem Kasumyan.
According to Roman Nekrasov, co-founder of the ENCRY Foundation, “secondary sanctions, risks of being on the FATF radar and other troubles that may be associated with transactions with Russian digital financial assets will thin out the already small group of enthusiasts.” Moreover, a number of crypto and blockchain projects, such as the AWEX crypto exchange, also fell under US blocking sanctions. According to the head of InDeFi Smart Bank, Sergei Mendeleev, crypto companies “will have a really difficult time, since their crypto will now be marked red in all analytics systems.”
Among the new SDN-List participants were a number of other Russian IT companies, including those working in the field of data protection, for example, LLC “Key Information Systems” (KIS) — competence center and distributor of Rusbitech-Astra, manufacturer of the Astra Linux operating system. Both companies declined to comment. On the KIS website, one of the partners is listed as working in the field of information security (IS) NPO “Eshelon”, whose structures were also on the sanctions list. The company did not respond to Kommersant’s request.
Denis Primakov, Head of the Sanctions Law and Compliance Practice at AB KIAP, explains that in the case of information security companies, there is a special basis for sanctions related to the Cyber-related Designations: “This regime is described in the CAATSA law, which includes persons who work against US cybersecurity.”
Among them was Crimean Cybersecurity Laboratory LLC, included in the SDN-List, which provides licensed FSTEC, FSB and MO firewalls, tools for building VPN virtual private networks, protecting the perimeter of information networks with intrusion detection tools. The customers of the company’s solutions are the telecom operator Miranda-Media (19.9% from Rostelecom), RNKB, the republican Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Education. The company itself does not expect consequences from the new restrictions: “The sanctions will affect us; we have not worked with foreign companies.”
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