US Treasury Sanctions Iran’s Largest Crypto Exchange Nobitex Along With Three Other Iranian Platforms Under Economic Fury Campaign

The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated four major Iranian cryptocurrency exchanges Tuesday as part of the Trump administration’s Economic Fury campaign: Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin, and Ramzinex. The action targets the financial infrastructure that has handled the majority of Iranian crypto activity in recent years.

The designations were extensive in scope.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

Treasury said Nobitex, Iran’s largest crypto exchange with approximately 11 million users, “processed over 50 percent of all Iranian digital asset inflows in 2025” and facilitated payments linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including wallets tied to IRGC-affiliated ransomware actors. Wallex, Iran’s second-largest exchange by volume, received about 12% of Iranian digital asset inflows in 2025. Bitpin received about 10%. Ramzinex, founded in Tehran in 2018, processed more than $2.45 billion in transactions, including activity tied to the IRGC and a government-backed financial institution.

OFAC designated Nobitex under both Executive Order 13224 for material support to the IRGC and Executive Order 13902 for operating in Iran’s financial sector.

The designations are why this matters structurally.

OFAC also blocked four Iranian nationals tied to Nobitex: chairman and co-founder Amir Hossein Rad, current CEO Seyed Ali Khoee, and co-founders Ali and Mohammad Kharrazi.

A Reuters investigation published last month identified the Kharrazi brothers as relatives of Iran’s supreme leadership, reporting that hundreds of millions of dollars tied to sanctioned Iranian entities had moved through their exchange.

The action means all property and interests in property of the designated persons under U.S. jurisdiction are blocked, and foreign financial institutions and individuals may face secondary sanctions if they engage in certain transactions with the firms.

Treasury said Nobitex also helped the Central Bank of Iran obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in stablecoins used to support the rial and enabled regime insiders to access international exchanges and evade sanctions.

A May 2026 Reuters investigation reported the platform had processed at least $2.3 billion since 2023 for sanctioned Iranian entities. Nobitex itself experienced a roughly $90 million exploit in June 2025 attributed to the pro-Israeli Predatory Sparrow hacking group, which combined with the OFAC designation effectively neutralizes the exchange as a functioning platform.

The action lands a week after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the United States had seized roughly $1 billion in Iranian crypto since the Economic Fury campaign began in March 2025. “Treasury will continue to follow the money in support of Economic Fury, whether it is through the banking system or through digital assets, to prevent the regime from developing a nuclear weapon,” Bessent said in Tuesday’s statement.

The campaign now combines asset seizures, exchange sanctions, and individual designations in a multi-pronged squeeze on Iran’s crypto-mediated financial networks.