Since January 22, the cryptocurrency exchange Kuna has been blocked in Ukraine by order of the State Special Communications Service, following a decision by the Shevchenko Court of Kyiv.
According to published documents, the lawsuit was initiated by the Bureau of Economic Security (BEB).
Providers have been instructed to restrict access to the domain name kuna.io and its subdomains on their recursive DNS servers.
“This order is in effect until the termination or cancellation of martial law in Ukraine,” stated the State Special Communications Service.
Kuna’s founder, Mykhailo Chobanian, reported on his Telegram channel that the court’s decision was made in the absence of their representatives, and they learned of the block from users.
“Most providers have already complied with the State Special Communications Service’s requirement, so it’s only a matter of time before the rest do. All our infrastructure is on cloud servers in Europe, so only users from Ukraine cannot access it,” he added.
The exact nature of the claims against the exchange remains unclear. The businessman promised to share details of the situation with ForkLog soon.
The editorial team has also requested comments from the BEB and the State Special Communications Service.
In May 2024, it became known that the Kuna exchange was considering selling its business in Ukraine and had already held initial talks with potential investors. Chobanian then explained this was due to high risks in the local market.
According to him, there is no effective cryptocurrency regulation in Ukraine, and due to NBU restrictions, companies in the sector have lost the ability to legally work with hryvnia cards.
Since the beginning of 2023, the BEB has been conducting a pre-trial investigation into bitcoin exchanges owned and founded by Ukrainian residents. The investigation was prompted by discrepancies between the turnover of crypto assets in the wallets of trading platforms and the declared income of their founders.
Based on this, the BEB determined the total amount of risky operations and the volume of potential losses to the state budget.
In August 2023, the NBU requested financial reports from Ukrainian banks regarding their interactions with the cryptocurrency exchanges Kuna and Qmall, as well as payment services CoinPay and GEO Pay.