The United States has imposed sanctions on Nobitex — Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchange — along with three other Iranian crypto platforms and their senior executives, accusing them of ser
The United States has imposed sanctions on Nobitex — Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchange — along with three other Iranian crypto platforms and their senior executives, accusing them of serving as a financial lifeline for the Iranian government, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Iran’s central bank.
The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced the designations on Tuesday, following a Reuters investigation that exposed how Nobitex had become a central pillar of Iran’s parallel financial architecture.
“While Iran’s economy is in free fall, the regime has chosen to co-opt digital asset technologies for its own corrupt agenda, including evading sanctions and transferring wealth out of the country,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an official statement.
Alongside Nobitex, three other Iranian exchanges — Wallex, Bitpin, and Ramzinex — were added to the OFAC sanctions list. The Treasury also individually sanctioned the two brothers who control Nobitex and the exchange’s chief executive officer.
What Nobitex Was Actually Doing
The sanctions follow a detailed Reuters investigation published on May 1st that revealed the full scope of Nobitex’s role in Iran’s financial system — and what that system was being used for.
According to the Treasury Department, more than half of all digital asset inflows into Iran in 2025 passed through Nobitex. The exchange was not operating as a neutral marketplace for retail traders. It was functioning as a critical node in a parallel financial network processing hundreds of millions of dollars for institutions that have been under Western sanctions for years — including Iran’s central bank and the IRGC.
The Reuters investigation added a significant political dimension to the story. Nobitex is controlled by two brothers from one of Iran’s most powerful and influential families — the Kharrazi family — with direct ties to Iran’s new supreme leader.
Corporate records revealed that when the exchange was established, the brothers were registered under a surname rarely associated with the family publicly, obscuring the connection. Their full names — Seyed Mohammad Ali Aghamir Mohammad Ali and Seyed Mohammad Aghamir Mohammad Ali — were included in Tuesday’s individual sanctions designations, along with CEO Amir Hossein Rad.
The timing of the OFAC action relative to the Reuters investigation is notable. The journalism established the factual record. The sanctions followed within weeks, using that record to justify the designations.
The Internet Shutdown That Exposed Everything
One of the most damaging details in both the Reuters report and the Treasury statement involves Nobitex’s continued operation during Iran’s government-imposed internet shutdown. When Iranian authorities cut internet access — a tool used repeatedly to suppress political unrest and limit information flow — Nobitex kept processing transactions. The exchange moved and protected assets on behalf of the regime even when the internet infrastructure that most Iranians depended on was deliberately disabled.
That detail matters enormously for the sanctions case. An exchange that continues operating through a government-imposed internet blackout, processing millions in transactions while civilian internet access is cut, is not a neutral financial services provider. It is infrastructure specifically maintained for state-level financial operations — and the Treasury’s statement reflects that assessment directly.
Nobitex’s Response
Nobitex could not be reached for comment before the sanctions announcement, which came after normal business hours in Iran. The exchange responded the following day via its Telegram channel — a platform the exchange apparently uses as its primary customer communication channel, presumably because of its encrypted and censorship-resistant properties.
The statement was notably un-alarmed. Nobitex told its customers it had anticipated potential sanctions complications for years, citing the specific challenges Iranian businesses face operating internationally.
“Accordingly, the necessary technical and operational preparations to deal with such circumstances have long been part of our planning,” the exchange wrote.
The composure of the response is itself a signal. A genuine sanctions designation from OFAC is one of the most severe financial penalties available to the United States government — it effectively cuts an entity off from the global dollar system and makes any interaction with it a sanctions violation for any counterparty worldwide. An exchange that responds to that designation by telling customers it had been expecting it, and had prepared for it, is describing an organization that has been operating in full awareness of its relationship with sanctioned entities.
The Broader Pattern: Crypto as Sanctions Infrastructure
The Nobitex sanctions arrive within weeks of the U.S. arrest of a Google engineer for using internal search data to profit on Polymarket, and in the same month that Iran launched Hormuz Safe — its Bitcoin-settled maritime insurance platform designed to bypass Western financial infrastructure in the Strait of Hormuz. Taken together, these stories paint a picture of the ways in which cryptocurrency’s permissionless architecture is being actively exploited by both state and non-state actors to route around the dollar system.
Iran’s use of crypto for sanctions evasion is not a new phenomenon. The country has been among the most aggressive state actors in developing cryptocurrency infrastructure as a parallel financial system — from Bitcoin mining operations that reportedly account for a significant share of global hashrate, to state-adjacent exchanges like Nobitex processing central bank transactions, to the Hormuz Safe platform announced just weeks ago.
What changes with Tuesday’s OFAC action is the scale of the enforcement response. Sanctioning the country’s largest exchange, three additional platforms, two controlling family members, and a CEO in a single announcement signals that the Treasury Department is treating Iranian crypto infrastructure as a serious national security concern — not a peripheral issue at the edge of the sanctions enforcement framework.
The full list of sanctioned entities and individuals is available on the Treasury Department’s official website.
