Arkham Published Iran's Central Bank Crypto Wallets as a Public Map. Here Is What It Shows

[johnblockbuster]

Blockchain analytics platform Arkham has created a publicly searchable entity page for wallets attributed to Iran's central bank, building the map around two TRC-20 addresses that the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control added to its Specially Designated Nationals list on April 24 as property of Bank Markazi Jomhouri Islami Iran, citing links to the IRGC-Qods Force and Hezbollah. The entity page groups the wallets into a single explorer that investigators and the public can use as a starting point to trace connected addresses and transaction flows across the blockchain. The designation and subsequent wallet mapping followed US authorities freezing approximately $344 million in crypto linked to Iran, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent describing the action as an effort to "systematically degrade Tehran's ability to generate, move, and repatriate funds." Tether separately froze the funds at the request of US authorities, citing activity tied to unlawful conduct without explicitly naming Iran in its public statement.

Arkham's publication of the entity map is part of a broader push by blockchain analytics firms and stablecoin issuers to expose sanctions evasion networks using Tron and Tether infrastructure. Chainalysis described a multi-step stablecoin pipeline in an April note where Iranian oil revenues were routed through brokers, intermediary wallets, cross-chain bridges, and DeFi protocols before cycling back into accounts associated with the Central Bank of Iran and IRGC-linked entities. The public availability of the entity page means that any counterparty that transacts with the identified wallets becomes visible to both regulators and the public simultaneously — a transparency mechanism that raises the compliance cost of doing business with sanctioned Iranian entities significantly, since ignorance of the wallet's designation becomes harder to claim once the information is publicly indexed.

[lingriiddd]

$344M frozen by Tether without naming Iran, diplomatic language doing real work

[lingriiddd]

Public Arkham entity page making ignorance of wallet designation harder to claim is the specific compliance cost increase mechanism