Treasury Sanctions Iran's BitBank Over Bitcoin Flows
The US Treasury blacklists Iranian exchange BitBank, alleging hundreds of millions in Bitcoin moved to the Revolutionary Guard via Strait of Hormuz shipping fees.
Treasury tightens the net
The US Treasury has added Iranian crypto exchange BitBank to OFAC's sanctions list, alleging that Bitcoin worth several hundred million dollars moved through the venue to Iran's Revolutionary Guard. The money came from an awkward source: shipping payments for passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint that carries roughly a fifth of the world's traded oil.
A familiar name behind it
BitBank sat inside a web built around already-sanctioned financier Babak Zanjani. The Hormuz Safe Marine Services Authority — also blacklisted — collected transit fees in Bitcoin and other digital assets and routed them through the exchange to Iranian entities. Alongside BitBank, Treasury named developer Pishtaz Simorgh Electronic Trade Company and three people in Zanjani's orbit. To OFAC, they are the load-bearing pieces of an infrastructure Tehran uses to route around Western sanctions on crypto rails.
Bessent draws the line
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent left no room for reading between the lines: funding the Iranian regime through cryptocurrency does not sit outside OFAC's reach. The designation bites immediately. US-held assets are frozen, US persons are barred from dealing with the named parties, and secondary sanctions put foreign firms in the crosshairs the moment they clear certain transactions.
A pattern, not a one-off
The move follows a playbook OFAC now runs on repeat. Document the real money flow first — here the Hormuz transit fees — then name the on-chain addresses and the shell companies behind them, then freeze the whole cluster at once. For Iranian actors the room keeps shrinking: any replacement venue stood up to succeed Nobitex or BitBank starts life already in the crosshairs. The cost of evasion rises and the efficiency of the workaround falls, which is precisely the point of the designation.
Why traders should care
Price isn't moving on this, and it shouldn't — the story is a compliance signal, not a catalyst. It extends a run that already swept up Nobitex and other venues as Washington closes the ring around Iran's crypto plumbing. The read-through: the regulatory premium on offshore venues with any Iran exposure stays put, and any exchange without clean provenance checks now carries a rising secondary-sanctions tail risk. Bitcoin has landed squarely inside the geopolitical sanctions toolkit — a settlement rail OFAC tracks with the same intent it brings to the dollar.