Iran’s central bank on Tron: $474M frozen in two steps, and $12.6M that left in the 82 days between them

On 23 April 2026 at 12:02:36 UTC Tether blacklisted two Tron addresses. The next day the US Treasury’s sanctions office, OFAC, added both to its entry for Bank Markazi, the Central Bank of Iran. Tether said it had frozen more than $344 million. On 14 July OFAC added four more Tron addresses to the same entry, and at 21:02:57 UTC that day Tether blacklisted them too; press reports put that second freeze at about $131 million.

That the wallets belong to the central bank is OFAC’s statement, not ours. Everything below is what the six addresses did on chain, read on 7 October 2026. For each of them the USDT received minus the USDT sent equals the balance to the cent, so nothing is missing from the count.

The two April wallets hold 212,922,805 and 131,288,802 USDT (TNiq9AXBp9EjUqhDhrwrfvAA8U3GUQZH81, TTiDLWE6fZK8okMJv6ijg42yrH6W2pjSr9). The four July wallets hold 85,527,016, 30,978,224, 12,306,816 and 1,285,180 USDT (TFQbqaNbmq2xsVor2NbufLkYZvxFC9wC7k, TJdgB1k6ot3f2nLuZug6D8eD3HavTmzmSK, TXGHxdYbGy574z5hBu4LNzq9NzjZQ9bhUf, TAhwhFv3JpK39Nc2m8W5LPCcoTisutiRfp). Together: 474,308,843 USDT, all of it blacklisted by Tether, which means it cannot be moved.

The oldest wallet has been active since 4 March 2021. The newest was first used on 16 April 2026.

Over five and a half years the six wallets received 526.5 million USDT from outside. It came in two waves: 361 million in 2021–2023, then almost nothing in 2024, then 165 million in 2025. After November 2025 no meaningful amount arrived at all.

There are 157 sending addresses, but five of them account for 98% of the money. One wallet sent 263.4 million in 2022–2023; it had itself been filled from another wallet that handled 381 million in thirteen months. A second sent 108.6 million in three transfers inside five minutes on the evening of 17 September 2025. A third sent 56.5 million in July 2025.

These feeder wallets are not on the sanctions list and are empty now. We do not know who owns them, so we do not name them. Small sums also came straight from exchange withdrawal wallets in 2021 — about 1.25 million from Binance and a few thousand from HTX.

On 16 April 2026, between 00:56 and 01:05 UTC, one of the wallets sent 84.5 million USDT in four transfers to an address that had never been used before, TFQbqaNbmq2xsVor2NbufLkYZvxFC9wC7k. With a few earlier test amounts the new wallet ended up with 85.5 million. It never made a single outgoing transfer.

Eight days later Tether froze the first two wallets. The new one was not among them. It sat for another 82 days with the money on it, and on 14 July it was listed and frozen with the full balance. Whatever the move was for, it did not help: the largest of the four July balances is the one that was shifted in April.

From 23 April to 14 July the first two wallets were frozen and the other four were not. Those four kept working. In that window they sent 12.56 million USDT to outside addresses in 27 transfers of $1,000 or more.

7.69 million left TXGHxdYbGy574z5hBu4LNzq9NzjZQ9bhUf: a string of payments of $61,000–$310,000 to wallets that each received a single transfer, 2.15 million to one address in two weeks, and on 25 June a single 4.0 million payment — the last outgoing transfer any of the six ever made. 4.87 million left TAhwhFv3JpK39Nc2m8W5LPCcoTisutiRfp in six payments to one and the same address, the last on 1 June.

After 25 June nothing moved. The second freeze, three weeks later, caught 130.1 million. Press reports citing Chainalysis say the four wallets had received over $165 million in total; on chain it is 165.5 million, and the 35.4 million difference is what they had paid out by then.

In total the six wallets paid 52.2 million USDT to 59 outside addresses. The receiving wallets are all close to empty today, and none of them is blacklisted by Tether.

The largest recipient, TANBQbt1PEwXxYqwGPeDy8rTmSXRQJHbUd, got 18.2 million in 32 payments between February and June 2026. It is not a wallet that served this one payer: over thirteen months it took in 134.4 million USDT from more than 200 addresses and paid the same amount out to 79. That is the profile of an exchange desk or broker. Its last transaction is dated 16 July 2026, two days after the second freeze.

The 4.0 million sent on 25 June went to a wallet that had already received 13.4 million from elsewhere and was passing it on in 1–3.5 million lots to a single address; that address is empty now. 780,000 USDT from two of the recipients sits unmoved on one further wallet. About 1.2 million reached a cross-chain bridge, and small amounts went to deposit addresses at an exchange.

After large payments to the broker’s address, a few dollars of USDT arrived at the paying wallet from addresses with the same first and last characters — seven times in all. This is address poisoning — strangers hoping the owner copies the wrong address from the history next time. It is aimed at big wallets in general, and it shows nobody was exempt.

Freezing stops the money that is still there. It does nothing about the money that already left, and the list of sanctioned addresses says nothing about who was paid. A wallet that received USDT directly from one of these six is one step away from a sanctioned central bank, whether or not it knew.

In our database the six addresses carry the sanctions label from OFAC’s list. We have also marked 60 addresses that traded with them directly — every counterparty with a turnover of $1,000 or more — as high risk, each with a note saying how much it received from or sent to the six wallets and that it is not on the sanctions list itself. We do not know who owns them; the mark records the transactions, not an identity. We did not mark exchange and bridge wallets or the broker’s address described above, because many unrelated customers pass through those; they still show the link to the sanctioned wallets. You can check any address on the address check page.

It does not say who owns any wallet other than repeating OFAC’s attribution of the six. It does not say the recipients knew whom they were dealing with or did anything unlawful. It covers USDT on Tron only; other tokens and other chains are outside it. The freeze amounts are our reading of the balances on 7 October 2026; the announced figures are Tether’s and the press’s. For a similar reading of a different sanctioned network, see Xinbi Guarantee.