The unfolding unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia is now another tragedy to add to our recent history’s ever-increasing list. On the bright side, the world response through non-violent means has been the most aggressive, coordinated and relatively successful effort in a very long time. Sanctions have grabbed attention and rightly so. This is not the time, however, to use a crisis to continue to demean cryptocurrencies and blockchain along the tired line of “some shadowy faceless group of super-coders and miners.”

The recent spate of commentary that Russia could use crypto to evade global sanctions must be put out to pasture. Russian gross domestic product last year was $1.5 trillion. The size of the worldwide crypto market, which includes many billions of dollars in coins that are very hard to sell without crashing prices, is $1.9 trillion. It’s hard to imagine Vladimir Putin -- a ruthless despot who may be the world’s richest man based on his strangle hold on Russia – giving up control of his wealth to a transparent and trackable global ledger.

Such small details seem to forever escape the opinionmakers and politicians who only show their ignorance of how digital assets work by making the crypto evasion allegation. While many people and news publications have thankfully refuted this argument, mainstream debates about it continue in the New York Times and from Senator Elizabeth Warren, Hilary Clinton and other Democratic Senators Mark Warner, Sherrod Brown and Jack Reed.

Cryptocurrencies risk undermining sanctions against Russia, allowing Putin and his cronies to evade economic pain.

U.S. financial regulators need to take this threat seriously and increase their scrutiny of digital assets. https://t.co/4lCUNcUC29

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) February 28, 2022

Certainly, individual Russians can use crypto to move their wealth, but the implication that an entire country the size of Russia could do so is ridiculous. For those who don’t know or ignore it, blockchain transactions are public and traceable. Even mixing techniques long thought to obfuscate digital custody tracing are now crack-able.

Here’s how Salman Banaei, head of public policy in North America for blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis, put it in an email, “it will be very difficult for the Russian government or financial elite to systematically evade sanctions through cryptocurrency. This is because of limited liquidity in the cryptocurrency markets to accommodate such levels of demand.”

Another point, made very well by Jake Chervinsky, is U.S. sanctions on Russia don’t permit any interaction with sanctioned entities, no matter if you were transacting in dollars, gold or Bitcoin. Russia and its top leaders would need very large and capable trading partners to use crypto to evade sanctions, an enormous risk to a counterparty that again would be done in the open.

1/ Russia can't & won't use crypto to evade sanctions.

Concerns about crypto's use for sanctions evasion are totally unfounded. They fundamentally misunderstand:

- how sanctions work
- how crypto markets work
- how Putin is actually trying to mitigate sanctions

I'll explain 🧵

— Jake Chervinsky (@jchervinsky) March 1, 2022

It’s also hard to not be discouraged by the cynicism of how some of the press and political class are choosing to frame this story. The emphasis on the negative and outlandish – crypto evades sanctions!!! – rather than the positive where random people all over the world donated $50 million and counting in crypto for Ukrainians is backward. It’s rather fascinating to see how threatened many in power are by crypto and how that fear informs them, isn’t it?

There are many issues to work out related to digital assets and how they fit into the larger financial world. The industry needs capable and willing partners in government and regulatory agencies to ensure fair rules are created going forward. But crypto is also culture and art and being embraced by society at large. It’s time for politicians to learn how it works and stop with the stupid.