WASHINGTON — The money kept moving even when the internet went dark. As American and Israeli strikes hit Iran earlier this year, a government-ordered blackout severed the country’s digital connections — yet transactions flowed through Nobitex, Iran’s dominant cryptocurrency exchange, shielding regime wealth from the disruption outside. On Tuesday, the United States Treasury Department decided it had seen enough.
The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Nobitex — alongside three smaller rivals, Wallex, Bitpin, and Ramzinex — under counterterrorism and Iran-related authorities, in the Trump administration’s most sweeping move yet against Tehran’s digital financial architecture. The four exchanges together accounted for at least 72 percent of all Iranian digital asset inflows in 2025, according to OFAC’s announcement. Nobitex alone handled more than half of that volume.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent framed the action in unambiguous terms. The Iranian regime, he said, had weaponized cryptocurrency against its own collapsing economy — using digital assets to evade Iran’s mounting sanctions and move wealth abroad while ordinary Iranians absorbed the consequences of a rial that has lost nearly 90 percent of its value since 2018. “While Iran’s economy is in free fall, the regime has chosen to co-opt digital asset technologies for its own corrupt agenda,” Bessent said in a statement, “including evading sanctions and transferring wealth out of the country.”
What makes Tuesday’s action different from previous rounds of Iran sanctions is what the Treasury chose to reveal about who actually runs Nobitex. The two brothers sanctioned alongside the exchange’s chief executive — listed in OFAC filings under the surname Aghamir Mohammad Ali — are members of the Kharrazi family, one of the most influential political dynasties in the Islamic Republic, with documented family ties to Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. A Reuters investigation published in May had traced the connection through corporate registries, university records, and banking filings, finding that the brothers used an alternative surname when founding the exchange in 2018 — obscuring a bloodline that their father, Ayatollah Bagher Kharrazi, had used to help staff the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps after the 1979 revolution.
Nobitex denied any government affiliation and said the brothers had never changed their identity. Any illicit funds moving through the platform, the company told Reuters in April, did so without management awareness or approval. The exchange could not be reached for comment after Tuesday’s announcement, which came after normal business hours in Tehran.
The dynasty question is not merely biographical. It goes to the structural argument the Treasury is now making: that Nobitex was never simply a private startup navigating a sanctions-heavy environment. It was, according to OFAC, a node in a parallel financial system purpose-built to serve the state — processing hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions linked to both the IRGC and the Central Bank of Iran, facilitating stablecoin purchases used to prop up the rial, and enabling IRGC-affiliated ransomware operators to cash out. The Treasury also noted that the exchange had processed roughly $90 million before and after a significant cyberattack it sustained in June 2025, attributed to a pro-Israeli hacker group that deliberately burned the stolen funds rather than keeping them.
The wartime dimension of the designation carries implications beyond any individual exchange. Iran’s broader crypto ecosystem was valued at approximately $7.8 billion in 2025, according to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, which also found that addresses associated with the IRGC accounted for more than 50 percent of total value received by Iranian crypto markets in the fourth quarter of last year alone. That is not a marginal compliance problem. It is, as US national security officials now describe it, a shadow central bank operating outside Western oversight — one the Treasury has been methodically dismantling since American combat operations in Iran began on February 28.
The sequence matters. In April, stablecoin issuer Tether froze $344.2 million held across two wallets attributed to the Central Bank of Iran — in what blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs described as the largest on-chain freeze of Iranian sovereign crypto reserves ever recorded. Bessent told Fox Business last month that the United States has now seized approximately $1 billion in Iranian cryptocurrency since the war began. Tuesday’s designations do not represent a one-time enforcement action. They are part of a rolling campaign — the Treasury’s Operation Economic Fury — that is deploying financial tools in near-real time alongside military operations.
That campaign has also widened its aperture beyond exchanges. The Treasury’s announcement noted that it has separately warned of sanctions risk for any shipping operator that pays Iran’s so-called Hormuz tolls — fees the IRGC has demanded from vessels transiting the strait — including payments made in cryptocurrency, stablecoins, or “in-kind” transfers described as charitable donations. The explicit inclusion of digital assets in that warning closes a gap that Iran had been exploiting as Western pressure on its oil revenues intensified through 2025 and into the war. CoinDesk reported that the announcement came just days after Bessent said his department had already seized around $1 billion in crypto from Iranian exchanges and wallets.
For the roughly 11 million Iranians who used Nobitex — more than 10 percent of the country’s population — the designation creates a practical problem with no obvious solution. The rial has collapsed. The banking system is under sanctions. Cryptocurrency served, for many ordinary citizens, as the only reliable store of value and the only mechanism for sending money abroad. Blockchain analytics data showed spikes in Bitcoin withdrawals to personal wallets coinciding with each wave of domestic unrest and each round of military strikes. These were not IRGC transactions. They were people trying to protect savings that a government-inflated currency was eating alive.
The Treasury’s action does not distinguish between those users and the regime officials who also moved money through the platform. That ambiguity — the same infrastructure serving both a sanctioned revolutionary guard and a frightened software engineer trying to preserve savings — is what made Nobitex politically untouchable for so long. A Reuters investigation earlier this year found that Nobitex continued processing millions of dollars in transactions even after the government shut down the internet during protests, using the Tron blockchain’s resilience to route around the blackout. The exchange was, in that moment, more reliable than Iran’s own banking system. The Treasury now argues that reliability made it indispensable to the regime, not just to its citizens.
What the US has not yet resolved is whether sanctions alone are sufficient to shut down a platform that, by its own account, handles 70 percent of Iran’s crypto volume. Nobitex has survived a $90 million hack, government internet shutdowns, and years of increasingly pointed scrutiny from American lawmakers. It rebuilt each time. Whether an OFAC designation — which bars American entities and anyone operating in the dollar system from dealing with the exchange — translates into operational disruption depends partly on whether the global crypto infrastructure, including major exchanges like Binance, will enforce the designation rigorously. That question remains open. The Treasury has not said.
Also designated on Tuesday was Amir Hossein Rad, Nobitex’s chairman and co-founder, who OFAC accused of helping rebuild the exchange’s operations after the 2025 cyberattack, and Seyed Ali Khoee, the exchange’s current chief executive. Their personal designations are intended to prevent reconstruction under new corporate names, a tactic Iran-linked entities have used before. Whether the Kharrazi brothers — who have spent years operating under an alternative surname — have the institutional depth to survive this round is, as of now, unknown. Congress, meanwhile, has demanded greater oversight of the administration’s Iran campaign, a debate that now extends to whether financial warfare without legislative authorization is enough to end a war that military operations alone have not.
