KnownOrigin quietly banned artists from Iran, Cuba, and other sanctioned nations on 15 June. eBay closed its acquisition of the Manchester marketplace seven days later. The community that built the platform is now asking whether the founders traded their principles for a payday.
KnownOrigin, the Manchester-based NFT marketplace that spent four years cultivating a reputation as a home for independent digital artists, quietly banned creators from Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Syria, and parts of Ukraine on 15 June 2022. Seven days later, on 22 June, eBay announced it had signed and closed the acquisition of KnownOrigin for an undisclosed sum. The two events are not a coincidence.
The ban, which KnownOrigin said was enacted "to match the criteria for sanctions in the global ecosystem as a whole," locked artists out of a platform many had used since its earliest days. No advance warning was given. No transition period was offered. Creators in affected countries simply found themselves unable to access accounts, list new work, or collect secondary-market royalties through the platform.
The reaction from affected artists was immediate and furious. Many had joined KnownOrigin specifically because the platform had positioned itself as a refuge after OpenSea began enforcing similar bans months earlier.
KnownOrigin is a British company. It was founded in Manchester and incorporated under English law. The United Kingdom maintains its own sanctions regime, which overlaps with but is not identical to the restrictions imposed by the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control. The decision to adopt what amounts to American OFAC compliance — banning entire nationalities rather than specific designated persons — was not a legal obligation for a UK-registered entity. It was a commercial one. The timing, one week before a US corporate parent took ownership, makes the rationale plain: eBay's lawyers needed the platform clean before the ink dried.
Co-founders David Moore, Andy Gray, and James Morgan knew what they were building when they launched KnownOrigin out of a Manchester basement in 2018. The pitch was decentralisation, creative freedom, and direct access between artists and collectors without gatekeepers. The platform grew slowly, accumulating $7.8 million in total trade volume over four years and earning loyalty from a tight community of digital artists who chose KnownOrigin over larger rivals precisely because it felt independent. That independence is now gone, and Moore, Gray, and Morgan appear to have been negotiating the sale while simultaneously purging the user base to satisfy their incoming American owner.
When eBay announced the deal on 22 June, the contrast between the corporate press release and the reality on the ground could not have been starker.
The community noticed. On the day of the acquisition announcement, an NFT titled "Sellouts" was trending on KnownOrigin itself. Artists used the platform to protest what was happening to the platform — a fitting use of a medium supposedly built on censorship resistance and individual sovereignty.
Cuban artists were hit particularly hard. The NFTcuba.ART collective, organised by Cuban-American artist Gianni D'Alerta, represents roughly 100 artists worldwide. At least 30 Cuban creators had profiles delisted from KnownOrigin and other American-owned NFT marketplaces. The Associated Press reported that one Cuban artist, Alejandro Pablo García Alarcón, who had sold approximately 20 NFTs on these platforms, was locked out of his account without explanation. Gabriel Guerra Bianchini, the first Cuba-resident artist to auction an NFT, found his profile reduced to a 404 error page. Fábrica de Arte Cubano, Havana's most prominent interactive art space, was also removed.
Some Cuban artists responded by burning their KnownOrigin pieces entirely and migrating to alternative chains.
Iranian artists face a similar situation, though fewer have spoken publicly, likely because doing so carries additional personal risk. The broader Iranian NFT community had found in platforms like KnownOrigin a rare economic lifeline — as one artist noted, a small sale in the West can mean a great deal in a country where international banking access is severely restricted and the local currency is in freefall. That lifeline has been cut.
The Web3 promise was that decentralised technology would make this kind of exclusion impossible. Art minted on Ethereum exists on-chain regardless of which marketplace chooses to list it. But in practice, visibility is everything. An NFT that cannot be found on KnownOrigin or OpenSea is functionally invisible to the vast majority of collectors. The token still exists; the audience does not.
eBay has not disclosed the acquisition price. KnownOrigin raised £3.5 million in a Series A round in February 2022, just four months before the sale. Moore, Gray, and Morgan — who built a community on promises of creative autonomy and borderless commerce — have walked away with an undisclosed sum from one of the largest e-commerce corporations on earth. The artists from Tehran and Havana who helped build KnownOrigin's reputation have walked away with nothing.
Neither eBay nor KnownOrigin responded to requests for comment. US sanctions enforcement has grown sharply in recent years, with OFAC pursuing penalties against financial platforms that facilitate transactions involving sanctioned jurisdictions. For a $24 billion public company like eBay, even the perception of non-compliance would represent an unacceptable legal risk — which explains why KnownOrigin's terms changed the week before closing.
The question for the NFT community is not whether sanctions compliance was inevitable once American corporate money entered the picture. It was. The question is whether the founders of KnownOrigin owed their earliest supporters — the artists who minted when nobody was watching, who evangelised the platform when the trade volume was measured in thousands rather than millions — something more than a silent ban and an exit.
