Treasury Sanctions Iran’s BitBank Exchange Over Bitcoin Transfers to IRGC Since June

The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Iranian crypto exchange BitBank on Thursday, accusing it of moving bitcoin on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Two independent outlets, Bitcoin Magazine and The Block, reported the designation the same day, both citing the Treasury’s own statement as the source of the underlying facts.

According to Treasury, the previously sanctioned Hormuz Safe Marine Services Authority has used BitBank since June to funnel payments to the Iranian regime. That timeline, a specific start month rather than a vague “recently,” is one of the few hard data points in the release and it appears consistently across both reports.

Who Else Is on the List

The action falls under Operation Economic Outcast, the administration’s broader economic campaign against Iran. Alongside BitBank, Treasury named Iranian financier Babak Zanjani, software developer Pishtaz Simorgh Electronic Trade Company, and three individuals identified as Zanjani associates: Hossein Ali Zaker Hossein, Mohammad Mahdi Zaker Hossein, and Seyed Adel Heidari.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent framed the move in blunt terms. “Today’s designations of Iranian digital asset infrastructure make perfectly clear that efforts to finance the Iranian regime using cryptocurrencies are not beyond OFAC’s reach,” he said, adding: “If you support the Iranian regime, the Department of the Treasury will sanction you.”

Treasury said the goal is to dismantle the “architecture Zanjani built to launder funds,” and pledged to keep targeting both Iran’s domestic digital asset ecosystem and the international entities that connect to it. No dollar or bitcoin volume figure for the transfers has been disclosed in either report, and neither outlet cites an on-chain address or block explorer trail tied to BitBank. That is the gap worth flagging: the sanction is asset-specific in name, bitcoin, but not yet quantified in size.

Why Bitcoin Specifically

Iran has faced U.S. sanctions for decades, and Treasury notes the regime has leaned more heavily on cryptocurrencies, bitcoin among them, to route around those penalties this year. Naming bitcoin explicitly in the designation signals that OFAC now treats exchange-level infrastructure, not just wallet addresses, as a target when it sits inside Iran’s sanctions-evasion pipeline.

For traders and compliance teams, the practical takeaway is narrower than the headline suggests. This is a designation against a named Iranian exchange and five individuals or entities tied to it, not a new rule affecting bitcoin transactions broadly. Exchanges with global operations will still need to screen the newly listed names against their own sanctions lists, a routine but immediate obligation once OFAC publishes a designation.

Both source reports rely on the same Treasury statement rather than independent on-chain verification, which is worth keeping in mind before treating any transfer figures as confirmed. As of Thursday’s release, no updated total for bitcoin moved through BitBank since June has been published by Treasury.

Sources

• bitcoinmagazine.com
• theblock.co