US sanctions the bitcoin exchange behind Iran’s Strait of Hormuz toll booth

The US Treasury sanctioned the Iranian digital asset exchange Bitbank, its software developer Pishtaz Simorgh Electronic Trade Company and three other parties². The Treasury said the action was taken over bitcoin transfers to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps¹. It also designated the Iranian financier Babak Zanjani and his software firm; most of the assets frozen at the time of an earlier action were Tether stablecoins⁶.

The link to the war is the toll booth. The Treasury said the Hormuz Safe Marine Services Authority, itself already under sanction by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, has used BitBank since June to transfer payments it collects³. CoinDesk reported that Iran has spent this year charging tankers between $1 million and $2 million to cross the Strait of Hormuz, and that the Treasury traced those receipts through the exchange⁴. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said efforts to finance the Iranian regime through cryptocurrency were not beyond the reach of the sanctions office⁵.

Why it matters to investors

The practical weight of the designation sits in its reach beyond US jurisdiction. The Treasury said all three individuals and both companies named are subject to secondary sanctions, which exposes non-US financial institutions that continue to deal with them⁷. Foreign firms that keep transacting with those parties face secondary-sanctions risk, and BitBank itself has been identified as Iran-based⁹.

That draws a compliance line through venues and banks with no American presence. The designation also tests the limits of asset freezes across different instruments: stablecoins such as Tether’s USDT can be frozen by the company that issues them, while bitcoin, being decentralised and having no single issuer, cannot be blocked the same way¹.

What to watch

Washington paired the designations with a bounty. The United States is offering a reward of up to $15 million for information that disrupts the Revolutionary Guard’s financial network and its branches⁸.

Three markers follow. The first is whether exchanges and banks outside the United States change their handling of Iran-linked flows now that secondary-sanctions exposure has been stated explicitly^7,9. The second is whether the toll payments continue through another route, given that the authority collecting them has been under sanction and switched to the exchange in June³. The third is whether tanker operators keep paying to transit at all, since the tolls run into seven figures per crossing⁴.