Washington's economic war on Iran and its 'shadow' banking network continues, as on Friday Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the US has seized $1 billion in Iranian cryptocurrency assets as part of the economic component of President Trump's Operation Epic Fury.
The billion dollar figure represents the running total seized to date, building on prior milestones in the conflict, particularly a recent major April 2026 freeze of $344 million in USDT on the Tron blockchain. By close of April, $500 million total had been seized.
And so clearly with the addition since then of some half-billion dollars more in seized digital assets, the US Treasury program has only greatly accelerated in the last several weeks.
During his Friday speech before the Reagan National Economic Forum, Bessent stated:
"Just outright grabbed the wallets. Some of them may be typing in right now and might not realize their wallet had been grabbed."
Assets are held "on behalf of the Iranian people" - he described, while framing that the Iranian government had 'stolen' the money from the Iranian populace.
Bessent is signaling further relentless waves of OFAC wallet designations and aggressive asset forfeitures coming in the next months, as highly sanctioned Iran continues to seek alternative means of conducting financial transactions.
As we've featured before, for ordinary Iranians - roughly one in six of the population - crypto served as a vital lifeline. Facing relentless rial depreciation (down nearly 90 percent since 2018), chronic inflation of 40 to 50 percent, and frequent power blackouts or internet shutdowns during protests, citizens turned to Bitcoin and stablecoins like U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins (USDT) on the Tron network to hedge savings, facilitate remittances, and move value when traditional banking failed. Spikes in Bitcoin withdrawals to personal wallets often coincided with domestic unrest and regional conflicts.
Yet this parallel financial system has also become a powerful tool for the state. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) steadily tightened its grip on Iran’s crypto flows. IRGC-linked addresses received more than $3 billion in 2025—up from over $2 billion in 2024—with their share rising to more than 50 percent of total Iranian crypto inflows by the end of 2025. These figures represent conservative lower bounds based only on identified and sanctioned wallets.
Washington in the meantime is still entertaining dreams of sparking some kind of anti-regime uprising based on applying the economic squeeze to the Iranian system, but apart from unrest back in January, this has utterly failed to materialize.