The US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, OFAC, designated Nobitex on 2 June under two authorities at once: Executive Order 13224, the counterterrorism order, and Executive Order 13902, which covers Iran's financial sector1. Nobitex is Iran's largest cryptocurrency exchange, handling more than half of all Iranian digital-asset inflows in 2025. Treasury named three more exchanges beside it: Wallex at 12 per cent of inflows, Bitpin at 10 per cent, and Ramzinex, through which $2.45 billion had passed. Four of Iran's busiest exchanges lost dollar access on a single day.
Four individuals went on the list under the counterterrorism order, including Nobitex chairman Amir Hossein Rad and two members of the Kharrazi family, who sit inside Mojtaba Khamenei's inner circle. Treasury says it has now frozen close to $500 million in regime-linked crypto under its Economic Fury campaign, the same thread that began with the PGSA designation on 28 May. The State Department added a $15 million bounty through Rewards for Justice for information disrupting IRGC financial mechanisms2.
Follow the plumbing. Nobitex was the rail the Central Bank of Iran used to reach dollar stablecoins and slow the rial's fall, and the IRGC (Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) levied its Hormuz tanker tolls in those same stablecoins. The same designation that drains the currency defence also drains the toll machine, because both flows passed through the named exchanges. Defenders call it the cleanest pressure available short of force. Critics note that crypto rails reroute fast, and an exchange can spin up fresh wallets in a weekend, so the freeze's bite depends on whether foreign counterparties actually refuse the named wallets.
