US Treasury Freezes $131 Million in Iran-Linked Crypto Wallets

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control on Tuesday imposed sanctions on multiple cryptocurrency wallets linked to Iran’s Central Bank and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with stablecoin publisher Tether freezing more than $131 million at four addresses on the Tron blockchain.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed the move in a post on Separately the Treasury seven people convicted linked to a global arms procurement network for the Iranian armed forces, IRGC – including a Tehran-based drone parts supplier, a Nigerian intermediary and Russian nationals linked to a Moscow aerospace company.

To understand why this is important, you need to understand how it works. USDT – a digital token issued by Tether, pegged one-to-one to the US dollar – runs on blockchains such as Ethereum and Tron, outside the banking system from which Iran has been largely cut off for years. Because Tether issues the token, it retains the ability to freeze specific wallet addresses at the software level, rendering the funds immobile.

Blockchain makes this enforcement possible – and what makes Iran’s crypto solution less secure than it seems. Transactions on public networks like Tron are permanently visible, and US agencies work with analytics companies to track how money moves. The more centralized a blockchain or crypto solution is, the more susceptible it is to censorship.

Ari Redford of TRM Labs told Bloomberg in April that law enforcement agencies can “track and trace the flow of money to build cases – and potentially seize them” when actors try to make money on regulated exchanges, which must comply with US rules.

“It has become a game of cat and mouse between the financial enablers of the IRGC and the National Security Agencies to try to stop Iran from withdrawing,” he said.

Iran has spent years building a crypto infrastructure to circumvent sanctions. The country legalized Bitcoin mining in 2019 and turned to USDT to stabilize a rial (the local fiat currency) in freefall and regulate international trade. Blockchain analytics company Chainalysis followed almost $8 billion in attributed Iranian crypto volume by 2026 – TRM claims this is close $10 billion– with IRGC-associated addresses accounting for more than half of the country’s inflows in the last quarter of that year.

Tuesday’s freeze is the latest move in a campaign called Operation Economic Rage. In April, Tether froze $344 million worth of USDT at two other Tron addresses linked to Iran’s central bank. In May, Bessent said the US had seized about $1 billion in Iranian crypto since the start of the campaign. In June, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Iran’s four largest exchanges, including Nobitex, which handled more than half of the country’s digital asset volume by 2025 alone.

Tether say it now works with more than 340 law enforcement agencies in 65 countries and has frozen more than $4.4 billion in assets since it began coordinating with authorities, including more than $2.1 billion tied to U.S. enforcement actions.

Editor’s note: This story was updated for clarity after publication.