The US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned crypto exchanges Shelbit and Aban Tether on August 7, accusing both of moving funds for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and widening a campaign that has now designated Iran-linked crypto platforms roughly every month or two since January.
OFAC's numbers describe Shelbit as considerably more than a peripheral player: blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs traced more than $6.3 billion in flows through the unlicensed, Dubai-registered exchange between May 2024 and March 2026, which OFAC described as a settlement layer for Iran's illicit economy rather than evidence of any single large transfer. Treasury said IRGC-linked wallets sent over $1 million in crypto to Shelbit and received more than $2 million back, while separate wallets tied to Shelbit's operator, Siavash Kayvanpour, sent over $2 million to Nobitex, Iran's largest exchange and already under sanction since June. OFAC also designated Kayvanpour personally, along with companies he controls in Georgia, Poland, and the UAE, and said Shelbit separately serviced a network of more than 2,000 gambling websites tied to two Iranian influencers already convicted of illegal gambling, allegedly laundering tens of millions of dollars through the same platform. The second exchange, Aban Tether, is based inside Iran and was designated for processing transactions with Nobitex and other previously sanctioned Iranian platforms including Wallex, Bitpin, and Ramzinex.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent framed the action as evidence the broader pressure campaign is landing: "Economic Fury is working," he said, adding that Treasury will keep dismantling illicit networks regardless of currency. The State Department is separately offering up to $15 million for information disrupting the financial machinery behind Iran's military.
This is the fourth distinct round of crypto-specific Iran sanctions in 2026 that Blockhead has tracked. Treasury sanctioned Zedcex and Zedxion in January as its first crypto-specific designations under the campaign, blacklisted Nobitex and several other exchanges in June, and moved against four wallets tied to Iran's central bank in July — an action that led Tether to freeze roughly $131 million held in those wallets in coordination with US authorities, continuing a pattern of stablecoin-issuer compliance Blockhead has covered as it scaled through the year. Binance, for its part, told The Block that Shelbit never held an account on its platform and disputed a $540 million figure tied to the case, saying any Shelbit-linked accounts had already been investigated, frozen, and reported.
Each round of sanctions targets the same underlying vulnerability: crypto's usefulness as a channel that moves faster than traditional correspondent banking can be monitored, particularly across a network of shell companies spanning multiple jurisdictions. Blockhead's own reporting on Iran's crypto activity has shown how quickly that channel gets used under pressure — Bitcoin outflows from Nobitex jumped roughly 700% in the hours after last year's Tehran airstrikes , underscoring crypto's role as a release valve during acute crises rather than only a long-run sanctions-evasion tool. For exchanges and custodians serving institutional clients, the more durable takeaway from Shelbit's designation isn't the specific dollar figures — it's that a Dubai-registered platform with no obvious Iranian branding still moved billions before Treasury caught up, a reminder that geographic distance from Tehran is not the same thing as compliance distance from Iran-linked flows.
