Iran’s Strait of Hormuz toll booth ran through a bitcoin exchange, U.S. says
The U.S. Treasury sanctioned BitBank, a Tehran exchange it says moved hundreds of millions of dollars in bitcoin to the Revolutionary Guards and handled payments collected from ships buying passage through the world’s most important oil chokepoint.
Iran has spent this year charging tankers between $1 million and $2 million to cross the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. Treasury said that since June, part of that money has moved through a cryptocurrency exchange in Tehran.
A Thursday release shows The Office of Foreign Assets Control has designated BitBank, a Tehran crypto exchange set up in 2024, alongwith Pishtaz Simorgh Electronic Trade Company, the software firm that built it.
"Today's designations of Iranian digital asset infrastructure make perfectly clear that efforts to finance the Iranian regime using cryptocurrencies are not beyond OFAC's reach," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
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