By Tom Wilson and Gavin Finch
LONDON, May 18 (Reuters) - When customers of Iran’s largest crypto exchange needed to move billions of dollars, networks created by two of the industry’s biggest players served as conduits.
And from the early stages of President Donald Trump’s flagship digital currency venture, the same two players lent credibility to the startup.
According to data analysed by Reuters, Iran’s Nobitex exchange has processed at least $2.3 billion since 2023 on Tron and BNB Chain, blockchains
established respectively under crypto billionaires Justin Sun and Changpeng Zhao. Users of Tron and BNB Chain pay fees to use the blockchains, which serve as secure, tamper-resistant record keepers.
Iranian money has kept moving through those two digital ledgers during the U.S. and Israeli war against the Islamic Republic.
Sun and Binance, the crypto exchange owned by Zhao, are both prominent backers of World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm co-founded by Trump and his family.
There’s no suggestion that the Trump family knew of Nobitex’s use of Tron and BNB Chain.
Still, the Iran transactions highlight the potentially conflicted position in which the Trumps’ sprawling business interests have placed the U.S. presidency. The family-owned Trump Organization real-estate empire, for example, continues to pursue foreign deals.
The use of the blockchains by institutions in a country the United States is at war with is a “dramatic irony,” said John Reed Stark, a former chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of Internet Enforcement. “The entities doing crypto financing through these platforms are the very ones that the president is trying to defeat in the war.”
The administration denies that Trump’s businesses pose any conflict of interest. “Reuters’ bizarre attempts to link President Trump to Iran’s banking system are totally laughable,” said Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman. She referred Reuters to World Liberty for further questions.
A spokeswoman for World Liberty said the company has no relationship with Nobitex and follows U.S. law. “World Liberty does not own, operate, or control Tron in any way, and has no authority over transactions conducted on it,” she said.
Nobitex, which is used extensively by sanctioned Iranian institutions and ordinary citizens, has processed more than $2 billion on Tron since January 1, 2023, according to a Reuters breakdown of public blockchain data from crypto analytics firm Arkham.
Since 2023, Nobitex also has processed at least $317 million on BNB Chain, a blockchain formerly known as Binance Smart Chain that was developed by Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange.
Reuters is reporting the data from Arkham, which did not respond to a request for comment, for the first time.
BLOCKCHAIN LINKS
Since the Iran war started in February, crypto worth at least $22.6 million has moved through Nobitex on BNB Chain, and at least $550,000 has moved via Tron.
Reuters reported on May 1 that Nobitex is controlled by two brothers from a powerful Iranian family that has close ties to the new supreme leader. Under the brothers’ leadership, the exchange has grown from a startup into a central node of a parallel Iranian financial system used to evade Western sanctions. Reuters found that its users have included Iran’s central bank and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, known as the IRGC.
About $7.8 billion in crypto flowed between Nobitex and the Binance exchange between 2018 and 2022, Reuters reported in 2022. About three-quarters of the Iranian funds that passed through Binance were in Tron’s cryptocurrency. Nobitex encouraged clients to use Tron’s crypto to trade anonymously without “endangering assets due to sanctions,” Reuters reported.
Four crypto analysts, including two specialists in Iran’s use of digital assets, reviewed Reuters’ calculation that Nobitex has handled at least $2.3 billion in transactions via BNB Chain and Tron. All said it was sound.
One of the Iran specialists, independent researcher and investigator Rich Sanders, said the true volume was likely significantly higher because flows are visible only for wallet addresses known to be owned by Nobitex. The Iranian company has publicly said it switches addresses to make tracing and intercepting transfers harder.
Presented with a detailed summary of this article, spokespeople for both Binance and BNB Chain told Reuters that Binance neither operates nor controls BNB Chain.
“BNB Chain is a public, permissionless blockchain maintained by an independent global community of validators,” BNB Chain spokeswoman Ana Nicoara said in a statement to Reuters. “It is not an exchange, not a company, and not Binance.”
The Binance spokesperson said the firm was “an initial contributor and incubator” of BNB Chain and provided early operational support. The operations and intellectual property of the BNB Chain website, which is the primary interface for users and developers of the blockchain, were transferred to a company called BNB Chain Technology Holding Limited in 2023, the spokesperson added.
Corporate records from Abu Dhabi, however, document ongoing ties between Binance and BNB Chain Technology. The filings, reviewed by Reuters, show that Zhao, the Binance founder and majority shareholder, is BNB Chain Technology’s only listed shareholder.
Relations between Tron’s founder Sun and World Liberty have recently turned sour. Sun in April sued World Liberty, accusing it of extortion for allegedly pressuring him to invest in its stablecoin. World Liberty countersued in early May, alleging defamation.
Asked about Nobitex’s use of Tron, a spokeswoman for Tron said it is a technology provider and unable to “monitor and investigate every user and every transaction” or prevent their trading. Nonetheless, Sun helped create an initiative that works with law enforcement, the spokeswoman said, without offering details. The initiative has frozen “hundreds of millions” in funds, including those “tied to sanctioned entities and terror financing,” she said.
In statements to Reuters, Nobitex denied having direct Iranian government connections or assisting the state, and said that any illicit funds moving through the exchange did so without management approval or awareness.
The U.S. Treasury Department, Iran’s government and its central bank did not respond to requests for comment about the ties between Binance, Tron and illicit Iranian funds.
A BANK’S CHAINS
Crypto exchanges such as Binance are platforms where people buy, sell or trade digital assets. Blockchains such as BNB Chain and Tron are public ledgers that record transactions and the digital “wallets” used to make them. Some exchanges, like Binance, have launched blockchains and issued their own digital tokens.
Like other blockchains, Tron and BNB Chain host a variety of crypto tokens, from coins issued by Tron and Binance themselves to stablecoins such as tether whose value is pegged to other assets. The Iran-linked transactions make up a small fraction of these networks’ overall volume.
Sanders and the other Iran crypto specialist, who requested anonymity, said that among those to use Tron and BNB Chain was the Central Bank of Iran. The United States sanctioned the central bank in 2019 for allegedly providing billions of dollars to the IRGC and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
The central bank bought more than $500 million of tether via Tron between November 2024 and June 2025, according to a report in January by blockchain analysis company Elliptic and the two Iran specialists. In the first six months of last year, around $347 million of the total was sent to Nobitex using Tron, Elliptic told Reuters.
The central bank also converted the tether to different coins and used other blockchains – including BNB Chain – to cover its tracks, the Iran specialists said. Some of that crypto was converted back to tether and routed to Nobitex and other exchanges, Sanders and the other Iran specialist added.
Since its founding in 2018, Nobitex has processed between tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions linked to sanctioned groups including Iran’s central bank and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to estimates by crypto analysts looking at sanctioned wallets.
It is unclear whether Tron and BNB Chain were aware their networks were used by the central bank and Nobitex, which has not been specifically sanctioned. Doing business with Iranian entities falls under general Western sanctions. Reuters could not determine why the United States has not sanctioned Nobitex.
Tether, the company which issues the stablecoin by the same name, said it had frozen multiple wallet addresses associated with Nobitex at the request of Israel. Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing did not respond to a request for comment.
Tether said crypto exchanges and platforms are responsible for compliance in trading on secondary markets.
A CRYPTO-FRIENDLY WHITE HOUSE
Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025 – and his embrace of crypto – shaped the fortunes of the president's family, Sun and Zhao.
Members of the Trump family have launched a string of crypto businesses, including World Liberty, that generated hundreds of millions of dollars in income in 2025, Reuters reported last year.
As World Liberty struggled to attract investors after its launch in October 2024, Sun, the founder of Tron, invested tens of millions of dollars in World Liberty’s WLFI tokens, lending momentum to the fledgling company.
In early 2025, an Abu Dhabi investment firm, MGX, bought a $2 billion stake in Binance. Soon after, World Liberty announced the purchase would be made in its USD1 stablecoin.
Binance’s acceptance of the World Liberty Financial stablecoin gave credibility to the newly launched token and was cited by World Liberty as evidence of “extraordinary, worldwide demand” for USD1. MGX’s acquisition could also yield millions of dollars annually for the Trumps, according to the Reuters report last year.
MGX has said it chose USD1 after evaluating several stablecoins, and that Binance had requested the use of crypto in the transaction.
In October 2025, Trump pardoned Zhao, the founder and former CEO of Binance, wiping away his federal conviction for failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program. Lawyers for Binance and Zhao, who has retained his majority stake in the company, have said there was no connection between the use of USD1 and the pardon.
Since taking office, Trump has launched a suite of crypto-friendly policies and U.S. regulators have paused enforcement actions against crypto companies and moguls. The Securities and Exchange Commission settled a lawsuit against Sun for alleged fraud in March for $10 million without Sun admitting any wrongdoing.
Sun's current portfolio of 4 billion WLFI tokens is worth roughly $266 million, according to Reuters calculations based on the latest WLFI price. Sun has also invested in Trump’s meme coin and has used his crypto platforms to boost USD1, World Liberty’s second cryptocurrency.
For its part, Binance has continued to support USD1, enabling the token’s trading with other crypto coins and incentivising users to hold it. Arkham data shows Binance now holds $3.8 billion of the Trump token.
(Reporting by Tom Wilson and Gavin Finch. Edited by Lori Hinnant and Michael Williams.)
