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Iran’s Strait of Hormuz toll booth ran through a bitcoin exchange, U.S. says
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The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned Tehran-based cryptocurrency exchange BitBank, alleging it moved hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and processed payments collected from ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. The action, announced Thursday by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, also targeted Pishtaz Simorgh Electronic Trade Company, the software firm that built BitBank. The exchange was established in 2024.
Treasury said BitBank moved hundreds of millions of dollars in bitcoin to the IRGC, a branch of Iran’s armed forces that controls much of the country’s economy and is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States. Over the same period, Hormuz Safe Marine Services Authority — the outfit Tehran uses to sell ships “safe passage” insurance, itself sanctioned on July 29 — began using BitBank to pass collected fees on to regime entities. HormuzSafe has charged tankers between $1 million and $2 million for passage through the world’s most important oil chokepoint.
HormuzSafe was developed by Iran’s economy ministry and advertises insurance, traffic control, and emergency response to vessels that pay. Shipping lawyers have called the arrangement a violation of transit rights under the Law of the Sea, OFAC said. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the designations make clear that efforts to finance the Iranian regime using cryptocurrencies are not beyond OFAC’s reach.
The sanctions freeze BitBank’s property under U.S. jurisdiction and bar Americans from dealing with it. The heavier clause is the secondary sanctions tag, which extends exposure to foreign firms: an exchange in Dubai or a bank in Istanbul that processes BitBank flows can itself be cut off from the U.S. financial system. For offshore venues that take Iranian users, the threat is losing dollar access rather than facing a U.S. court.
Wednesday’s action did not include a single cryptocurrency wallet address, however. OFAC has published bitcoin and Tron addresses in past crypto designations, including seven Tron wallets when it named Zedcex in January. Those address strings are what compliance teams actually load into screening software.
The designation signals increased U.S. scrutiny of digital asset infrastructure used by Iran. It may deter crypto exchanges worldwide from facilitating Iranian military-linked transactions. The move also underscores how Iran has tried to turn the Strait of Hormuz into a bitcoin-based insurance market, a practice the U.S. is determined to disrupt.
