Binance To Stop Accepting Russian Mastercard and Visa Cards

Russian Binance users will no longer be able to transact with Mastercard and Visa cards on the platform.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, Binance, announced today that “all transactions initiated with Mastercard and Visa cards issued in Russia will be unavailable on Binance.” This will be effective starting March 9 at 10 AM UTC+3.

Adding to the restriction on Russian Mastercard and Visa cards on the exchange platform, all transactions initiated with Mastercard and Visa cards by financial institutions outside of Russia will also be unavailable within the Russian Federation on Binance.

This follows the global sanctions imposed on Russia and all of the Russian citizens to pressure the nation’s presidency to end their attempt to invade Ukraine.

A few weeks back, CEO Changpeng Zhao stated that Binance will not block and freeze the accounts of Russian citizens.

Binance is not the only exchange platform that has refused to completely ban Russian customers. The CEO of Coinbase and the CEO of Kraken had both spoken against the banning of Russian users on their platform, too. However, all of the exchanges had agreed to comply with U.S. sanctions to the degree that blacklisted entities would be blocked from the platforms.

However, Binance was left with no choice but to suspend the usage of Russian Mastercard and Visa cards as the world’s largest card operators announced that they will discontinue services in Russia as part of the sanctions against Moscow. American express had also ceased its Russian operations last week.

Zhao shared the official Binance announcement on his personal Twitter account and added that the decision is out of their hands, and that the decision was not made by the Binance team.