Author: Beosin
On April 24, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced sanctions against two cryptocurrency addresses directly linked to the Central Bank of Iran, listing them as frozen assets of the Central Bank of Iran. Stablecoin issuer Tether also issued a statement saying it had cooperated with OFAC and U.S. law enforcement agencies to freeze approximately $344 million in USDT held in the aforementioned addresses.
https://ofac.treasury.gov/recent-actions/20260424
Sanctions Details and Address Analysis
OFAC has updated its sanctions designation on the Central Bank of Iran, adding new cryptocurrency addresses to its SDN list. The Central Bank of Iran was already on the sanctions list in 2019 for providing billions of dollars in funding to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah.
The two newly added cryptocurrency addresses are:
TNiq9AXBp9EjUqhDhrwrfvAA8U3GUQZH81
TTiDLWE6fZK8okMJv6ijg42yrH6W2pjSr9
Beosin has immediately marked the above addresses to ensure that the compliance team can screen for related risks through Beosin KYT.
By analyzing the addresses using the on-chain tracing tool Beosin Trace, we can obtain the following results:
According to Beosin Trace, the two addresses received approximately $370 million in inflows since March 2021, with the accumulation of funds essentially ceasing by the end of 2023. After that, the balances of the two addresses remained almost unchanged until this freeze. On April 24, Tether completed the freeze of approximately 344 million USDT from the two addresses.
Over the past five years, the outflow of funds from these two addresses has been relatively small, with the vast majority of transactions occurring between related addresses. A small amount of funds flowed into the HTX and Binance exchanges. In January 2022, 8.6 million USDT was transferred directly between the two sanctioned wallets. In January and February 2023, address TNiq transferred 11,171,051 USDT to its upstream address TCXfhTDMuS6pbfCEoACPcBf2EnnhMAAEWh in four separate transactions. This pattern of continuous fund accumulation and more inflows than outflows is consistent with the characteristics of sovereign reserve assets, rather than the typical behavior of operational wallets.
