The Department of Justice is investigating whether cryptocurrency titan Binance Holdings Ltd. “violated US sanctions on Iran by not stopping certain trading on its platform, according to people familiar with the matter,” Bloomberg Law and Reuters reported on Monday.
Bloomberg reported that agencies participating in an investigation into Binance include the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office and Justice Department criminal division.
“We maintain a zero-tolerance policy for sanctions violations. We fully cooperate with law enforcement, and we remain committed to rooting out and shutting down bad actors,” Binance spokesperson Ross O’Leary told Gizmodo in a written statement.
Binance bills itself as the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by user count and trading volume; it recorded $11.4 trillion in trading volume in the first half of 2026 and reported over 320 million users in July. Back in February 2026, both the Wall Street Journal and New York Times reported that Binance had fired or suspended at least four internal compliance investigators who raised concerns about $1.7 billion in payments from two Hong Kong-based companies, Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale, to crypto wallets allegedly tied to sanctioned, Iranian-backed entities, including Yemen’s Houthi rebels. The Guardian noted that now-former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao received a pardon from President Donald Trump in October 2025 for his conviction in a 2023 federal anti-money-laundering and sanctions case that ended with Binance paying $4.3 billion in fines, Zhao’s resignation, tighter compliance requirements, and an agreement to allow oversight from independent federal compliance monitors. (Binance has reportedly since lobbied regulators to remove the monitors.) That case also involved Iran as one part of broader allegations that Binance turned a blind eye to suspicious transactions around the world.
Binance denied the allegations and went so far as to sue the Journal for defamation. It published a blog post in March 2026 stating the “departures had nothing to do with the investigation itself,” that the inquiry was continuing, and that claims it had denied investigators access were “demonstrably false and contradicted by internal records.” The Journal filed a motion to dismiss the case last month, though the dispute continues to plod forward in court. As Bloomberg noted, an investigation isn’t the same as a charge, and federal investigations don’t always end with charges, a practice known as declination.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department filed a civil forfeiture claim against Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale, seeking to recover $61 million in proceeds from sales of black-market Iranian oil and petroleum products and arguing the broader sanctions-dodging scheme was “facilitated in large part” by the two companies and affiliated individuals. A forfeiture complaint in the case didn’t allege any wrongdoing by Binance.
Trump has continued to escalate sanctions on Iran throughout his second term, especially since the U.S. and Israel launched an ongoing war against Iran in February, resulting in the almost-total closure of the Strait of Hormuz and skyrocketing fuel prices in much of the world. However, the U.S. has continually imposed economic sanctions on Iran in some form since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. U.S. sanctions generally extend to proxies of sanctioned entities, and scrutiny has fallen on cryptocurrency exchanges. Exchanges fall under much of the same regulatory structure as traditional financial institutions on paper, but in practice, criminals turn to cryptocurrency for its decentralization and pseudonymity. Chainalysis estimated in March 2026 that the value of crypto sent to sanctioned entities surged nearly 700% in 2025, reaching $104 billion.
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