(Editor’s note: The headline has been updated and a statement from Binance has been added to this story.)
The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, is reportedly at the heart of a secret payment network established by Iranian billionaire financier Babak Zanjani to fund Iran’s military forces. The company has rejected the claims.
Until December, Zanjani, an “antisanction” operator, allegedly facilitated transactions worth $850 million over two years through a single trading account on Binance as Tehran prepared for potential conflict with the U.S. Experts in terrorism-financing, foreign law-enforcement officials, and individuals privy to the activity suggest that roughly half of these transactions likely financed Iran’s military, reported the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
Binance’s internal investigators concluded that the accounts were part of a money-laundering network designed to fund the Iranian regime, as per the report.
WSJ also reported that Iran’s central bank allegedly transferred $107 million in cryptocurrency into Binance accounts last year, while foreign investigators tracked roughly $260 million in transactions during 2024 and 2025 between Binance-linked accounts and wallets tied to sanctioned Iranian entities and suspected terrorist financiers.
Binance rejected the WSJ’s methodology for the report as “damagingly flawed” and stated that it did not permit any transactions with …