Infura, the service provider of Metamask, one of the most used smart contracts-based wallets, blocked the access of Venezuelans to the Ethereum blockchain. Reports about this happening circulated on social media, attributing it to the existence of sanctions that the infrastructure provider might have applied to Venezuela. However, Infura later stated this was the result of a misconfiguration issue related to other sanctions.
Infura setup disrupts Metamask support for Venezuelans
Infura, one of the most widely used service providers offering endpoint services to wallet programmers, has left Venezuelan users without the ability to access their funds using Metamask. Early reports of Metamask not working with Venezuelan IP addresses saw users on social media speculate that the suspension could be tied to a new round of sanctions against the country.
Ezio Rojas, a Bitcoin-linked Venezuelan attorney, informed on social media that Metamask was now unusable in the country, stating:
When you seek to access the wallet on the Ethereum network, the wallet throws an error that it “could not connect to the blockchain host”.
The report further explained that the Infura API revealed a geolocalization message when accessed by a Venezuelan IP, returning an error that said “This service is not available in your country.”
Mistakes have been made
This blockade of Venezuelan users was active for a few hours. The problem was solved by Infura, which quickly allowed citizens of the country to continue using Metamask and other services that use its terminals. The company explained what happened via social media, apologizing for the issues stemming from the incident.
Infura declared that all was a mistake, stating that:
By changing some configurations as a result of new sanctions guidelines from the United States and other jurisdictions, we mistakenly configured the settings wider than they should be. This was our oversight, and we are grateful that it was brought to our attention.
Metamask, which reached more than 10 million monthly active users in August, also clarified that its platform relied on Infura endpoints to access Ethereum blockchain data by default, but that this configuration could be changed by users if desired or in case of any service interruptions like the one that affected Venezuelans.
