The United States has escalated its economic campaign against Iran, placing the country's digital asset sector under the same sanctions authority long applied to its oil, banking and metals industries.

In a Monday announcement, the U.S. Department of the Treasury said the step further targets Iran's crypto-related methods of dodging sanctions in a new economic campaign against the country (press release).

. @SecScottBessent : "This is a sustained campaign to collapse every last option for Iran. Let there be no ambiguity as to the position of the United States: an economic engagement of any kind with this murderous regime will expose those responsible to the full reach of American… pic.twitter.com/tlx2gcNs1d"

— Treasury Department (@USTreasury) August 24, 2026

The action forms part of Operation Economic Outcast, a campaign against the Islamic Republic that has been dubbed "economic D-Day." It is a first, and represents a significant escalation in the level of exposure facing crypto businesses worldwide.

With the new action, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the Treasury office that administers and enforces U.S. sanctions programs, can sanction any person, regardless of where they are located. Treasury has used such powers against crypto businesses before — it blacklisted the exchange SUEX in 2021, the first time it sanctioned a virtual currency company — but those actions named individual entities rather than a whole country's digital asset economy.

"The Iranian regime increasingly turns to cryptocurrency as a tool of choice for sanctions evasion, supporting transactions linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iranian regime insiders," OFAC said in a statement. The IRGC, which the United States designated a foreign terrorist organization in 2019, is already among the most heavily sanctioned Iranian institutions.

Foreign exchanges, over-the-counter (OTC) desks, payment processors and infrastructure providers that knowingly facilitate transactions supporting Iran's digital asset sector are now exposed to designation themselves, along with the loss of access to the U.S. financial system that typically follows. Compliance teams across the crypto industry already screen customers and wallet addresses against OFAC's sanctions lists, which have included digital currency addresses since 2018.

OFAC also designated members of a group within the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) accused of hacking U.S. critical infrastructure on the regime's behalf, and published their wallets.

Group co-leader Behzad Mesri and members Keyvan Fayyaz Ghareh Blagh and Arman Kahzadian each had bitcoin and other crypto addresses added to the Treasury's sanctioned list. The three belong to a larger MOIS contingent that has pursued U.S. targets through data theft and intrusions against corporations and government offices. Mesri was indicted in the United States in 2018 over the hack of HBO, in which unreleased programming and scripts were stolen.

The designation builds on earlier moves in the U.S. campaign against Iran's use of digital assets. Bloomberg first reported in May that Iran had started a bitcoin-backed insurance service for Iranian shipping companies (report).

In July, the United States said it had frozen crypto linked to the Iranian regime, mostly in the form of the Tether stablecoin.

Stablecoins like Tether's USDT, the largest such token by market value, can be frozen by the company that issues the asset, but bitcoin — being decentralized and having no single issuer — cannot be frozen in the same way.

This article is based on reporting by Mathew Di Salvo for Bitcoin Magazine.