Restricted jurisdiction

A restricted jurisdiction is a country or region whose residents an offering will not accept. Instead of selling to anyone with a wallet and an internet connection, a compliant tokenized offering maintains a list of places it cannot or will not serve, and blocks them.

The reasons a jurisdiction ends up restricted fall into three buckets:

• Sanctions. Comprehensive sanctions programs (for example, those covering places like Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, or certain regions) make it illegal to transact with residents there. This is enforced through sanctions screening.
• Local securities law. In many countries a token may itself be a regulated security or financial product, and offering it to local residents without local registration would break that country's law - so the issuer excludes them.
• Issuer risk policy. An issuer may simply choose to exclude certain markets, including the US (common in a Regulation S offshore raise that must avoid US persons), to keep its offering structure clean.

Enforcement combines several tools: IP-based geoblocking of the website, country checks during KYC, and wallet whitelisting so only approved addresses can hold the token. Geoblocking alone is weak (VPNs defeat it), so identity-level checks do the real work.

Restricted-jurisdiction lists vary deal by deal and change as sanctions and local laws change, so they have to be maintained, not set once.

Source: U.S. Treasury OFAC (ofac.treasury.gov) and U.S. SEC (sec.gov), as of 2026.