Russia Will Use China’s UnionPay After Visa, Mastercard Departures

Russia Will use china’s UnionPay app after Mastercard and Visa stopped servicing Russian users and after receiving multiple sanctions against its financial system after the war in Ukraine started. Russia has been trying to find an alternative whether that is cryptocurrencies or something else, but now it will start using UnionPay so let’s read more about it in today’s cryptocurrency news.

Mastercard and Visa joined the list of companies that announced plans to withdraw from Russia. Because of that, Russia’s central bank said it will turn to China’s UnionPay system. President Vladimir Putin launched a special military operation against Ukraine which is still ongoing and there’s no real endgame in sight for both sides.

NATO and the EU decided not to escalate the conflict by getting militarily involved but they chose other options like imposing all sorts of sanctions against the wealthy individuals in Russia, the country, and also ordinary citizens. Most of the measures targetted the Russian federation financial system and among the was removing banks from the SWIFT system.

During this weekend, it became known that some of the biggest western financial companies will stop servicing Russians like PayPal, Mastercard, and visa. While speculations arise whether the locals will turn to crypto, given the surging trading volume since the war started, Russia’s central bank outlined other solutions. The institution said they will rely on China’s UnionPay system which was founded 20 years ago in Shanghai, China. UnionPay operates in over 180 countries and it is also worth noting that UnionPay can work together with Russia’s own payments system MIR.

As earlier reported, The leading US-based crypto exchange Coinbase blocked 25K Russian addresses related to individuals that were reportedly engaging in illegal activities. According to the official blog post, the leading US-based exchange blocked the addresses that belonged to Russian individuals that they believe were engaging in illicit activities and most of them were identified via the platform’s protective investigations. Further, the company shared the addresses with the US government to support the sanctions enforcement. During the onboarding, Coinbase checked account applications against the list of sanctioned invidious and entities like the ones maintained by the US, UK, EU, Singapore, Japan, Canada, and the United Nations.