- Investigation proved that Shelbit processed money even as the US and Israel waged a military campaign against Iran, and despite the exchange’s customer-facing website having been disabled for months.
The US sanctioned an unlicensed Dubai-based cryptocurrency exchange, alleging it served as a financial artery for Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other entities tied to the Iranian state.
The action against Shelbit comes after an investigation exposed the exchange as the hub of a sprawling $4 billion sanctions-evasion operation — and on the same day the Treasury Department widened its crackdown to include a second Iran-linked platform, Aban Tether.
Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent framed the designations in stark terms. “Treasury will hunt down and dismantle the illicit financial networks that keep the regime afloat,” he said in a statement accompanying the announcement.
The sanctions target not only Shelbit itself but also its founder, expatriate Iranian Siavash Kayvanpour, and a constellation of associated companies that the Treasury alleges provided material support to both the IRGC and Nobitex, Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, which Washington had blacklisted on June 2.
The Treasury’s action traced how Shelbit moved cryptocurrency on behalf of Iran’s central bank, routed funds through one of the world’s largest illegal online gambling networks, and sent digital assets to wallet addresses that Israeli authorities have linked directly to the IRGC.
The report described an operation so brazen that Shelbit continued processing money even as the US and Israel waged a military campaign against Iran, and despite the exchange’s customer-facing website having been disabled for months.
On August 1, the exchange posted a statement denying wrongdoing: “Shelbit LLC categorically rejects any suggestion that the company knowingly participated in money laundering, terrorist financing, illegal gambling activity, sanctions evasion, or activity on behalf of any sanctioned, military, or governmental organisation.”
The company also claimed it had ceased operations in January 2026 — an assertion at odds with evidence that money continued to move through its infrastructure well beyond that date.
According to reports, tens of millions of dollars that passed through Shelbit originated from a suspected Iranian bitcoin mining operation that minted new digital coins. Additional funds, amounting to many millions of dollars, were connected to an illegal gambling network run by two high-profile Iranian social media influencers.
The Treasury seized on this detail in its sanctions notice, declaring that “the Iranian regime’s willingness to allow this gambling network to operate highlights its hypocrisy and corruption.”
Scale of the operation
Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs later reported that Shelbit had processed more than $6.3 billion in total transaction volume — a figure considerably larger than the $4 billion detailed in the investigation, suggesting the full scope of the exchange’s activities may be even broader than what investigators have publicly documented.
The discrepancy points to the inherent opacity of unlicensed exchanges that operate across multiple jurisdictions with minimal oversight.
The Treasury’s simultaneous designation of Aban Tether, an Iran-based crypto exchange, widens the aperture on what officials describe as Tehran’s increasingly sophisticated use of digital assets to circumvent Western sanctions.
OFAC alleges that Aban Tether processed millions of dollars in transactions for already-sanctioned Iranian entities, including Nobitex, which the US had designated on June 2 for enabling the Iranian government to circumvent sanctions.
The US sanctions did not materialise in a vacuum. On July 24, Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) issued a formal notice stating that Shelbit was in violation of the United Arab Emirates’ money-laundering and terrorism-financing laws.
VARA ordered the exchange to “cease and desist” and published a notice of fines. It was not the regulator’s first action against Shelbit: VARA had previously sanctioned the exchange in January 2025, raising questions about how the platform was able to continue operating for another 18 months.
“The exposure identified by VARA extends beyond consumer protection to more egregious cross-border transactions with the propension to impact the integrity of the UAE financial system,” the regulator said in its July 24 notice, using language that signaled the gravity of its findings.
A pattern of Iranian crypto evasion
The Shelbit and Aban Tether designations are the latest in an escalating cycle of US actions targeting Iran’s use of cryptocurrency to evade sanctions. The June 2 sanctions against Nobitex and three other exchanges marked a significant escalation in the Treasury’s approach.
By August 7, OFAC had expanded its list of blacklisted Iranian digital asset exchanges, reflecting what officials describe as a concerted push to follow the money wherever the blockchain leads.
The challenge confronting regulators and law enforcement is structural. Unlicensed exchanges can establish nominal headquarters in jurisdictions with uneven enforcement capacity, maintain customer-facing websites that appear dormant while back-end processing continues, and leverage the pseudonymity of cryptocurrency to layer transactions in ways that complicate attribution. Shelbit, by all appearances, checked every one of these boxes.