Those are the regions lawyers have told us are subject to regional sanctions. That is, they apply to even everyday citizens. As we reported previously:
If the IP address of your browser session indicates you are located in a sanctioned region, we will prevent you from transacting with our wallet.It's unlikely there are many stackers in these regions, but as we continue working on understanding the laws we are obligated to follow, we will provide you with as many services as we are legally allowed. In the coming weeks, we will begin introducing noncustodial wallet options among other things.Zero privacy implications
We remain committed to never storing a stacker's IP address without permission. For these changes (when they go live), we simply check an IP against a database of IP ranges thought to belong to these regions and then discard the IP and the result of the query regardless of whether the IP is in one of these regions or not. Further, the IP range database is self-hosted so that your IP can't be stored by anyone else either.All of this compliance stuff is free and open source like everything else so you can be reasonably certain we are only doing what we say we are.
We are actively working on non-custodial (and 3rd party) wallet connections. Our WIP plans are to introduce these as part of a hybrid custodial wallet, then introduce more 3rd party connections, including 3rd party custodians, gradually tapering SN away from being a custodian.
These plans are WIP obviously - like everything - but we're looking forward to participating in the wallet ecosystem (finally) and offering as many possible wallet options as we can.