OFAC designated BitBank, an Iranian crypto exchange controlled by Babak Zanjani, along with its developer Pishtaz Simorgh Electronic Trade Company and three Zanjani associates on Thursday 17 September, in an action Treasury calls Operation Economic Outcast1. Treasury says the already-designated Hormuz Safe Marine Services Authority has used BitBank since June 2026 to move payments to the Iranian government, and that Zanjani's network has pushed hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)2. Treasury asserts both claims and no independent body has tested them.
Read against the shipping file, the designation describes a substitution rather than a discovery. A marine services authority exists to collect fees, and fees have to settle somewhere. Cut off from correspondent banking, that traffic moves onto an exchange, and an exchange is a smaller, more brittle thing to seize than a bank: it has a named operator, a named developer and a handful of addresses. The chain is easier to sanction and easier to rebuild, which is why these actions arrive in sequence.
OFAC hit an earlier Zanjani network under the same executive order on 24 July, so this is a campaign continuing rather than a new front. Nothing in the announcement names a successor exchange, and Treasury has not said how much of the flagged Bitcoin was frozen rather than merely traced, so how fast the network rebuilds cannot be judged from the designation alone.
