In brief
- OFAC sanctioned multiple wallets tied to Iran's central bank and the Iranian armed forces on Tuesday, resulting in Tether freezing over $131 million across four addresses on the Tron blockchain.
- On-chain analysts tracked the frozen funds to prior withdrawals from DTC Pay and Bitso.
- The Treasury separately sanctioned seven individuals and entities involved in a global Iranian weapons procurement network.
The U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned multiple cryptocurrency wallets tied to Iran's Central Bank and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on Tuesday, with stablecoin issuer Tether freezing over $131 million across four addresses on the Tron blockchain.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed the move in a post on X, vowing the U.S. would "aggressively follow the money and deny the Iranian regime access" to illicit funds. Separately, the Treasury sanctioned seven individuals linked to a global weapons procurement network for the Iranian armed forces, IRGC—including a Tehran-based drone parts supplier, a Nigerian intermediary, and Russian nationals tied to a Moscow aviation company.
.@USTreasury is committed to disrupting and degrading Iran’s illicit financial activities, including its abuse of digital assets. Today, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned multiple wallets tied to the Central Bank of Iran, resulting in the freeze of over $130…
— Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (@SecScottBessent) July 14, 2026
To understand why this matters, you have to understand how it works. USDT—a digital token issued by Tether pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar—runs on blockchains like Ethereum and Tron, outside the banking system Iran has been largely cut off from for years. Because Tether issues the token, it retains the ability to freeze specific wallet addresses at the software level, rendering the funds immovable.
On-chain analyst Specter on X identified the four frozen addresses before Bessent's announcement, tracing their links to both the IRGC and Iran's central bank. His analysis showed most of the funds had previously been withdrawn from DTC Pay, a payment service provider, and Bitso, a Latin American cryptocurrency exchange, before landing in the wallets OFAC ultimately sanctioned.
The wallet is linked OFAC sanctioned ISLAMIC REVOLUTIONARY GUARD CORPS (IRGC)- CENTRAL BANK OF THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN (BANK MARKAZI JOMHOURI ISLAMI IRAN) pic.twitter.com/f0wlcHrYDR
— Specter (@SpecterAnalyst) July 14, 2026
Blockchain is what makes this enforcement possible—and what makes Iran's crypto workaround less safe than it looks. Transactions on public networks like Tron are permanently visible, and U.S. agencies work alongside analytics firms to trace how money moves. The more centralized a blockchain or crypto solution is, the more prone it is to being censored.
TRM Labs' Ari Redford told Bloomberg in April that law enforcement can "track and trace the flow of funds to build cases—and potentially seize them” when actors try to cash out at regulated exchanges, which must comply with US rules.
“It has become this cat and mouse game between the IRGC financial facilitators and National Security (Agencies) to try to stop Iran from offraping,” he said.
Iran has spent years building a crypto infrastructure to circumvent sanctions. The country legalized Bitcoin mining in 2019 and turned to USDT to stabilize a rial (its local fiat currency) in freefall and settle international trade. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis tracked nearly $8 billion in attributed Iranian crypto volume in 2026—TRM argues it’s almost $10 billion—with IRGC-associated addresses accounting for more than half of the country's inflows in the final quarter of that year.
Tuesday's freeze is the latest move in a campaign branded Operation Economic Fury. In April, Tether froze $344 million in USDT across two other Tron addresses tied to Iran's central bank. By May, Bessent said the U.S. had seized roughly $1 billion in Iranian crypto total since the campaign began. In June, the Treasury sanctioned Iran's four largest exchanges, including Nobitex, which alone processed more than half of the country's digital asset volume in 2025.
Tether says it now works with more than 340 law enforcement agencies across 65 countries and has frozen more than $4.4 billion in assets since it began coordinating with authorities, including more than $2.1 billion tied to US enforcement actions.
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