By Nathan Ferguson
Earlier this week, the email marketing platform, Mailchimp stopped offering its services to accounts, including individuals and corporate organizations into crypto content. All accounts relating to crypto content, news, and other related services began to have issues accessing their accounts at the beginning of the week after which a notice was issued later of the service interruptions.
Among the companies affected by this move are Messari – a company in crypto research, and Edge wallet – a company providing crypto self-custody services.
In the early hours of Friday, Ethereum Foundation’s Sam Richards tweeted that the Ecosystem Support Program of the foundation is also facing suspension.
Also, as tweeted by Cory Klippsten, Swan Private – an advisory company focusing on BTC investment for corporate organizations and high-profiled individuals is also a victim of the incident. In light of the incident, Klippsten implores other marketing companies to step up their game in the industry.
In the same vein, the crypto news agency, Cointelegraph received notification of service interruption from Mailchimp even though it has jumped ship before the unexpected interruption. However, according to Cointelegraph, Mailchimp did not give an explicit response to all its inquiries about the new development. Mailchimp, however, made it clear that the reason for disabling accounts in this category is due to its service usage violations which are captured under the ‘Acceptable Use’ section on the policy page on the Mailchimp website.
Mailchimp’s Reason for the new development
In that section of the website, all prohibited contents were outlined and it includes content around cryptocurrencies, digital currencies, and other content relating to Initial Coin Offering (ICO). The restriction on the content, as mentioned by Mailchimp, is the abuse complaints received from other users who are recipients of these contents. Talking about the timeline for this development, it was shown on the website that the policy page was last updated in May 2021.
This mass suspension of accounts involved in crypto contents and other crypto-related activities this week is not the first of its kind in the history of Mailchimp. In 2018, the company did something related. Also, in 2018, Facebook started a move to restrict anyone from advertising crypto-related content on its platform, calling it “a breach of regulatory guidelines.” However, Facebook added that crypto contents are not outrightly restricted as long as the sender is not involved in the exchange, sale, production, marketing, or storage of cryptocurrencies.
Currently, apart from the notice sent to the affected users, there is no official statement from Mailchimp on its recent ‘disturbing’ action.