On September 21, the US Department of the Treasury sanctioned the crypto exchange SUEX. The sanctions are the first levied by the American government against a crypto exchange. Though the crypto space is notoriously anti-regulation, these sanctions should be seen as a good thing.

SUEX is an OTC crypto exchange registered in the Czech Republic, though it maintains no physical presence there. Instead the firm operate primarily in Moscow and St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida). The sanctions are a result of SUEX’s role in facilitating ransomware payments. According to the Treasury Department’s statement, more than 40 percent of SUEX’s transaction history is linked to illicit activity, an assertion backed up by data and software firm Chainanalysis, which collaborated with Treasury’s investigation.

As a practical matter, these sanctions mean the any assets SUEX may have had in the US are now frozen and the Americans can no longer transact on the platform. It may not be a death knell for SUEX but loosing access to a large and wealthy customer base is certainly a blow. I, any case, I have no sympathy for what the Chainanalysis report describes as “one of the worst offenders” for cryptocurrency-based money laundering.

As I’ve written before, for those of us who seek widespread crypto adoption, criminal elements associate with crypto are a public relations nightmare. They give crypto a bad name, cause market turbulence and increase FUD in general. This may be an unfair perception played up by the media, crime linked to crypto is generally lower than crime linked to fiat,  but the public relations problem exists separate and apart from the reality of crypto-enabled crime.

Further, we must acknowledge that, despite the meta-level statistics showing that crypto is a low-crime environment, ransomware attacks are a specific type of criminal activity that is made easier by cryptocurrencies. As such, the crypto community should welcome any advances in curtailing ransomware attacks on both moral (extorsion is bad, m’kay) and practical grounds.

Therefore, these sanctions ought to be celebrated as a positive step forward for the crypto community. Goodbye and good riddance to SUEX.