Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Friday that American authorities had seized roughly $1 billion in cryptocurrency tied to Iran, the largest U.S. action of its kind against a single country’s digital assets, according to people familiar with Treasury’s records. The disclosure came as the administration’s campaign to cut off Tehran’s access to global finance enters its second year.
“I believe that we have seized about a billion dollars of their crypto,” Bessent said at the Reagan National Economic Forum in Simi Valley, California. “Just outright grabbed the wallets. Some of them may be typing in right now and might not realize that their wallet has been grabbed.”
The seizures are part of Operation Economic Fury, a campaign President Trump ordered in March 2025. The operation spans bank-account freezes, sanctions designations, naval activity near the Strait of Hormuz and coordination with European allies on property seizures. On a single Tuesday this spring, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned 35 entities and individuals tied to Iran’s shadow-banking network. Separately, OFAC has hit Chinese refineries and dozens of shipping firms that move Iranian crude, along with suppliers of components for Shahed-series attack drones and ballistic-missile propellants.
The crypto haul grew in steps. In late April, Tether, the company behind the USDT stablecoin, froze $344 million in digital assets across two Tron-blockchain addresses that blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis had linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — one wallet holding roughly $213 million, the other $131 million. The publicly reported total climbed past $500 million within days. Bessent’s May 29 figure put the running total near $1 billion.
The seizures demonstrate how stablecoins, designed to move value cheaply and instantly, have also given governments a tool that works in the other direction. Tether froze the Iranian wallets at Treasury’s request, a step the company has taken in past sanctions actions. The episode reignited a long-running argument over whether private issuers of digital currency should act as enforcement arms of governments, and how much power a single company holds over assets it does not, strictly speaking, own.
Iran’s economy is already under pressure from the broader campaign. One of the country’s largest banks collapsed in December. The rial has fallen 60% to 70% against the dollar. “They’re in the middle of a currency crisis,” Bessent said.
The seizures also cast a light on Iran’s own experiments with digital assets. Reports this spring said Tehran was weighing a plan to charge ships tolls in Bitcoin for passage through the Strait of Hormuz — roughly $1 per barrel of oil for loaded tankers, free passage for empty ones — and that revenue had already been collected, according to Forbes, though the Iranian government has not confirmed it. The plan would give Iran a way to monetize the chokepoint through which about a fifth of the world’s oil moves, while bypassing the dollar-based banking system that Washington controls.
Chainalysis has described the Hormuz tolls as a potential first for state adoption of cryptocurrency, and the Treasury campaign as the most sweeping sanctions response to it: OFAC has designated Iran’s digital-assets sector itself, exposing anyone who operates in or supports it to secondary sanctions. The move, announced as part of the broader operation, was a first-of-its-kind sectoral determination under the executive order that authorizes the campaign.
For Iran, the crypto seizure is less about the money than the method. Washington has frozen Iranian bank accounts for decades. The new step extends that reach into wallets that Tehran had treated as outside the traditional financial system — a message that digital assets are not a refuge from sanctions but another surface to be attacked.
The message matters more than the amount, former Treasury officials said. A billion dollars is meaningful for a country whose currency has lost most of its value, but it is not decisive for a government whose economy is already cut off from Western finance. What the seizure signals is permanence: the tools of financial warfare now reach into blockchain wallets, and the “borderless” promise of cryptocurrency stops where sanctions begin.
What happens to the seized funds is unresolved. Forfeiture proceedings will determine whether the assets are liquidated, and Bessent has suggested further seizures are coming. “We’ll see,” he said when asked about easing sanctions, which he tied to conditions Tehran must meet.
For the crypto industry, the episode sharpens an uncomfortable question. If stablecoin issuers freeze wallets at a government’s request, and exchanges face legal exposure for handling sanctioned assets, how different is the digital-asset system from the one it was meant to replace? Traders said the market took the seizure in stride, since the largest wallets had been neutralized in April, but the regulatory direction is clear. Every jurisdiction watching the operation is learning the same lesson: cryptocurrency has become a tool of statecraft, and the wallets are no longer off-limits.
