The U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned multiple cryptocurrency wallets tied to Iran's Central Bank and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on Tuesday, with stablecoin issuer Tether freezing over $131 million across four addresses on the Tron blockchain.
To understand why this matters, you have to understand how it works. USDT—a digital token issued by Tether pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar—runs on blockchains like Ethereum and Tron, outside the banking system Iran has been largely cut off from for years. Because Tether issues the token, it retains the ability to freeze specific wallet addresses at the software level, rendering the funds immovable.
On-chain analyst Specter on X identified the four frozen addresses before Bessent's announcement, tracing their links to both the IRGC and Iran's central bank. His analysis showed most of the funds had previously been withdrawn from DTC Pay, a payment service provider, and Bitso, a Latin American cryptocurrency exchange, before landing in the wallets OFAC ultimately sanctioned.
Blockchain is what makes this enforcement possible—and what makes Iran's crypto workaround less safe than it looks. Transactions on public networks like Tron are permanently visible, and U.S. agencies work alongside analytics firms to trace how money moves. The more centralized a blockchain or crypto solution is, the more prone it is to being censored.
“It has become this cat and mouse game between the IRGC financial facilitators and National Security (Agencies) to try to stop Iran from offraping,” he said.
