The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Iran’s four largest domestic cryptocurrency exchanges on Tuesday as the financial front of the ongoing kinetic war expands. The Office of Foreign Assets Control targeted Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin, and Ramzinex under a newly launched Trump administration initiative called “Operation Economic Fury.” The U.S. and Israeli military strikes that began on February 28 disrupted physical trade routes, forcing Tehran to rely heavily on its $7.8 billion domestic digital asset market to bypass international banking embargoes.
Nobitex processed more than 50% of all Iranian digital asset inflows in 2025. Treasury officials identified the platform as a central node for sanctions evasion, terrorist financing, and direct transactional support for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The U.S. government also confirmed it seized nearly $500 million in Iranian digital assets to date, according to a detailed report published by The Block regarding the executive designations.
The Treasury explicitly froze the assets of top Nobitex executives. Chairman and co-founder Amir Hossein Rad, CEO Seyed Ali Khoee, and co-founders Ali and Mohammad Kharrazi are all named in the Tuesday release. The Kharrazi brothers reportedly hold direct links to Iran’s supreme leadership.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Iranian regime is exploiting digital asset technologies to transfer wealth out of the country as its domestic economy collapses. During recent military escalations, Iran subjected its citizens to severe internet blackouts that caused a 99% connectivity loss for retail crypto users. The regime simultaneously operated a VIP parallel infrastructure inside Nobitex to move state funds without triggering blockchain analytics flags.
How Secondary Penalties Forced a Global Exchange Retreat
Tuesday’s sweeping sanctions build upon the unprecedented January designations of UK-registered, Iran-linked exchanges Zedcex and Zedxion. The regulatory focus shifted entirely from tracking individual wallets to dismantling structural trading platforms.
Global exchanges anticipated this regulatory escalation. Platforms like Binance previously faced intense congressional investigations led by Senator Richard Blumenthal regarding their indirect exposure to sanctioned Iranian entities through platforms like Nobitex.
That political pressure forced international platforms to cut their exposure to major Iranian exchanges by over 97% earlier this year to avoid secondary U.S. penalties. The Treasury’s direct strike on Nobitex and Wallex executes the core mandate of Operation Economic Fury, putting all remaining global intermediaries on notice that processing transactions linked to Iran’s domestic infrastructure will result in severe financial consequences.