Iranian security forces have used two cryptocurrency exchanges registered in Britain to move about $1 billion since 2023, evading international economic sanctions, according to a new analysis from a company specializing in crypto investigations.
The two exchanges identified by TRM Labs gave Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a way to move large sums of money across borders, with the group using a mechanism disguised as a mundane piece of the crypto sector’s financial infrastructure. In doing so, the Revolutionary Guard demonstrated a new level of sophistication in using cryptocurrency, TRM Labs said.
The IRGC is the most important player in Iran’s military and security establishment and is under wide-ranging sanctions imposed by the United States and other Western countries, partly in response to their concerns over whether Iran may be trying to obtain nuclear weapons. The sanctions, which also apply to many other organizations and companies linked to Iran’s government, largely preclude them from transferring money across international borders.
The IRGC needs to conduct international transactions in part because it supports militant groups outside Iran’s borders, including Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and to procure parts for Iran’s weapons and nuclear programs. But by its nature, the use of cryptocurrency makes it difficult to determine the source and destination of funds, and TRM Labs did not identify the purpose of the transactions in its analysis. (The U.S. Treasury Department has previously said that Iranian financiers have used cryptocurrency to facilitate oil sales.)
For years, the IRGC and other Iranian entities have used an international network of front companies with opaque ownership to operate, the United States. has found. The TRM Labs report concluded that the Revolutionary Guard has now also managed to transfer funds on a large scale using two cryptocurrency firms, Zedcex and Zedxion, which TRM determined were related to each other. The IRGC transactions represented 56 percent of the firms’ volume between 2023 and 2025, the analysis found.
Instead of using isolated or intermittent crypto transactions, “Iranian-linked actors — including sanctioned military organizations — appear to be testing more persistent crypto infrastructure,” said Ari Redbord, global head of policy at TRM Labs, in an emailed statement.
A spokesman for Iran’s mission to the United Nations declined to comment.
“The $1 billion figure over two years demonstrates that digital currencies are becoming a financial channel for Iran’s shadow banking apparatus,” said Miad Maleki, a former U.S. Treasury official who worked on Iran sanctions efforts and is now a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Snir Levi, founder of Israeli crypto analysis firm Nominis, said that an initial analysis by his firm based on the same public data also found that the exchanges were used by the Iranian military organization. The analysis linked at least $150 million in IRGC transactions using Zedxion and Zedcex.
Zedcex and Zedxion did not respond to detailed questions.
Zedcex and Zedxion describe themselves as exchanges where users can trade a range of digital currencies. On its website, Zedxion says it makes efforts to comply with anti-money-laundering regulations, including by confirming customers’ identities. It also says that it does not open accounts for citizens and residents of countries under sanctions. A list of nearly 50 such countries and territories on the firm’s website does not include Iran. Zedcex also says that its services and platform are prohibited for anyone “located, incorporated, established in, operating from, or a resident” of nearly 30 countries, including Iran.
The British Treasury’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation declined to comment.
As part of their probe, TRM investigators said they made small deposits to and withdrawals from Zedcex and Zedxion to trace where the funds went, thus unmasking the exchanges’ internal infrastructure. TRM Labs also searched for money transfers involving a list of 187 “wallet addresses” — identifiers akin to bank account numbers publicly listed for every crypto transaction — that Israeli authorities had designated last year as controlled by the Revolutionary Guard, as well as a small number of other wallet addresses that the investigators determined belonged to the IRGC.
TRM Labs said it was ultimately able to determine that the wallets associated with Zedcex and Zedxion — which were found to be essentially two brand names for the same business operation — routed funds among IRGC wallets, offshore intermediaries and Iranian crypto companies.
Such IRGC-linked transactions accounted for about $24 million in 2023, $619 million in 2024 and $410 million in 2025, TRM Labs said. The vast majority of the IRGC transactions were done via the Tether currency USDT, a popular “stablecoin” that is meant to maintain a price of one dollar, on Tron, a popular cryptocurrency network.
Tron said it has worked with both TRM and Tether to combat illicit activity on its platform, which it says has dropped “precipitously.” Tether did not comment.
One of the transactions, TRM said, was a $10 million payment from an IRGC wallet to wallets controlled by a Yemeni man whom the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned in 2021, accusing him of smuggling Iranian fuel to fund Yemen’s Houthis. A Houthi spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
The TRM analysis also linked the exchanges to a prominent Iranian businessman, Babak Zanjani, by noting that the name given for one of their directors and the person’s birth date information matched Zanjani’s. He did not respond to detailed questions sent to his social media account.
During the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Zanjani helped the Iranian government sell its oil on the global market, successfully routing sanctions levied over the country’s nuclear program.
But in 2013, Zanjani was put under sanctions by the Obama administration for financing sales of Iranian oil, and the same year, he was accused by the Iranian government of embezzling more than $2 billion. He denied the charges, saying he had been unable to pay back the money because the sanctions placed on him had blocked his assets overseas.
Zanjani was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. But the sentence was never carried out and was commuted in mid-2024, and he was released recently from prison. The U.S. sanctions against him were lifted in 2016 after Iran struck a deal with the United States and other world powers over its nuclear program, and they were never reinstated.
Aaron Schaffer in Washington and Burhan Yuksekkas in Istanbul contributed to this report.
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