Yuga Labs Stops ApeCoin Staking for US and Canadian Citizens

Yuga Labs announced that now users from the United States of America and Canada cannot stake their ApeCoins, which act as internal tokens of the economic system of the Bored Ape Yacht Club's main collection of NFT tokens.

Such a ban is most likely due to the fact that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) initiated an investigation towards Yuga Labs. The SEC suspects the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and ApeCoin collection of violating federal laws. In addition, they decided to thoroughly study the question of whether the above-mentioned tokens can be considered full-fledged securities or not. The ApeCoin staking process puts Yuga Labs in the awkward position of being dependent on US regulators. The latter, in turn, want to hinder the activities of cryptocurrency companies that can offer coin staking services.

A couple of months ago in the US, regulators from eight different states began demanding that Nexo stop promoting interest-bearing crypto products. In their opinion, the cryptocurrency lender wants to engage in the sale of unregistered securities. Coinbase also ran into trouble due to the SEC ban. A well-known crypto exchange wanted to launch a highly profitable USDC stablecoin product, but the US Securities and Exchange Commission banned them from doing so.

Returning to the topic with ApeCoin, staking of the coin is also currently not available in other countries: Syria, Iran, Cuba, Russia, Crimea, Donetsk Republic and Luhansk Republic. Due to the regulatory environment, developers have no choice but to block the feature in some countries. They also reported on their Twitter account that, despite the restriction created for users who want to send coins for staking, smart contracts are technically still available.

Yuga Labs said that this is one of the main advantages of the decentralized finance sector:

We want to remind the community that one of the benefits of decentralized finance is the ability for everyone to interact with smart contracts or develop solutions that allow other users to do so.