US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the United States has seized close to half a billion dollars in Iranian cryptocurrency assets as part of its ongoing maximum economic pressure campaign against Tehran.
Speaking on Fox Business’ “Kudlow” on Wednesday, Bessent said the Treasury Department grabbed roughly $350 million in crypto assets and an additional $100 million seized separately, bringing the total close to $500 million.
“We were able to grab about 350 million crypto assets, and then on top of another 100 that we had recently gotten, so we’re almost at half a billion there, and we are freezing bank accounts everywhere,” Bessent said during the appearance.
The effort is part of what the administration calls “Operation Economic Fury,” a broader campaign aimed at crippling Tehran’s financial lifelines through asset seizures, account freezes, and diplomatic pressure on foreign governments to isolate Iran’s economy.
Tether freeze forms the bulk of the seizure
The largest single action within this campaign came on April 23, when stablecoin issuer Tether froze more than $344 million in USDT across two addresses on the Tron blockchain after receiving information from multiple US authorities, including the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
OFAC simultaneously updated its Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list to add the two wallet addresses as property of the Central Bank of Iran, with linkages to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah.
According to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, the two wallets collectively received approximately $370 million across nearly 1,000 transactions over more than five years, with inflows beginning in March 2021. Outbound activity across both addresses totaled roughly $25 million in USDT over their lifetimes, less than 7% of the volume received.
TRM Labs described the addresses as “reserve infrastructure rather than operational wallets,” noting one wallet had zero outbound transfer history while the other moved less than $16 million out against more than $228 million in.
The frozen funds were primarily held in USDT on the Tron network. One address held around $213 million and the other approximately $131 million.
Washington says pressure campaign has Iran in ‘Crisis’
Bessent said the economic campaign, which President Donald Trump ordered the Treasury Department to launch in March 2025, has pushed Iran toward a breaking point.
“That created massive inflation. Their currency is down about 60 or 70% versus the US dollar, so they’re in the middle of a currency crisis,” Bessent said on Kudlow.
He added that the nation’s largest bank collapsed in December, further destabilizing the Iranian financial system.
Bessent said Trump recently directed officials to intensify the pressure even further. “President Trump told me three weeks ago to up the pressure again. We have gone to the buyers of Iranian oil and told them that we are willing to do secondary sanctions on your industries, on your banks who tolerate Iranian oil in their system.”
Bessent also said Washington is tracking Iranian assets beyond crypto. “The retirement funds that they thought that they had outside of Iran, we are freezing. We’re holding those for the Iranian people. Same with all their villas in the south of France and all over the world, and we are going to track them down.”
Naval blockade and oil pressure add to the squeeze
The crypto seizures sit alongside a wider military and economic pressure campaign. Bessent argued that the combination of Operation Economic Fury and the US naval blockade on Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz will inflict permanent damage on Tehran’s economy.
“The port at Kharg Island is at a virtual standstill in terms of loadings. We think that the Iranian storage will be full soon. They’ll have to start capping in their wells, which will lead to permanent problems,” Bessent said.
He warned that the pressure campaign could leave Iran unable to fund its military operations and proxy networks. “The regime won’t be able to pay their soldiers, and equally important, is they won’t be able to fund their proxies, whether it’s Hezbollah, Hamas, around the world.”
Iran’s oil exports through Kharg Island, which handles approximately 90% of the country’s crude shipments, have already been disrupted. The Treasury has also targeted Iran’s international shadow banking infrastructure, weapons procurement networks, and the “shadow fleet” of tankers used to conceal oil origins.
Iran’s crypto dependency under the scanner
The seizure highlights the growing role of cryptocurrency in Iran’s sanctions evasion strategy. Chainalysis reported that Iranian wallets received a record $7.8 billion in cryptocurrency in 2025, while TRM Labs estimated roughly $10 billion in total Iran-linked crypto activity that same year.
The IRGC alone accounted for nearly half of all on-chain holdings in the final quarter of 2025, according to Chainalysis. The Central Bank of Iran had been using increasingly complex methods to move funds, routing stablecoins through DeFi protocols, cross-chain bridges, and intermediary wallets before cycling them back into the domestic crypto ecosystem and IRGC-affiliated entities.
This is not the first crypto-specific enforcement action under Economic Fury. In January, OFAC designated two UK-registered crypto exchanges, Zedcex and Zedxion, for processing transactions on behalf of the IRGC. That was the first time OFAC had ever sanctioned digital asset exchanges specifically for operating in Iran’s financial sector.
Skeptics question whether the seizure moves the needle
Not everyone is convinced the seizures will meaningfully alter Tehran’s behavior. Daniel Tannebaum, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and partner at Oliver Wyman, said the freeze is “meaningful” but questioned whether it would be enough to stop Iran from operating as it has.
“The way to get at Iran at this point, because Iran is truly sanctioned out, is to go with the third-country actors enabling them,” Tannebaum said, pointing to countries like China as the more consequential choke point.
Iran has been sanctioned for decades and has built mechanisms to adapt, including turning to cryptocurrency mining and stablecoin accumulation as alternatives to traditional banking channels.
What comes next
Bessent said the Treasury’s economic pressure campaign will continue alongside the naval blockade as US-Iran negotiations remain stalled.
“We are going to continue this, the economic pressure as well as the block on the Strait of Hormuz,” Bessent said. He described the campaign as having been over a year in the making but said the United States is now “sprinting” toward the finish line.
The exchange comes amid wider tensions, including earlier US statements predicting damage to Iran’s oil infrastructure. Iranian officials have dismissed some of these claims after no immediate disruptions followed. Meanwhile, reports have surfaced that Iran has been accepting Bitcoin as payment for transit fees it imposed on oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
For the crypto industry, the action underscores a growing reality: centralized stablecoins like USDT are becoming active tools of sanctions enforcement. Tether’s ability to freeze tokens at the smart-contract level, regardless of the underlying blockchain’s decentralization, gives US authorities a direct lever over one of the most widely used digital currencies in the world.
Also Read: U.S. Seizes 503 Crypto Scam Websites in Major Fraud Crackdown
