Nominis: $344M USDT Freeze Tied to Chinese Exchange Links
Nominis says five anomalies in OFAC‑designated wallets tied to a $344M USDT freeze point to Chinese exchange infrastructure rather than Iran’s IRGC.
Blockchain intelligence firm Nominis published an analysis Sunday identifying five anomalies in wallets designated by the U.S. Treasury that it says link the $344 million in frozen Tether (USDT) to Chinese exchange infrastructure rather than to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Nominis CEO Snir Levi noted the first anomaly as an accumulate‑then‑dormant pattern. The firm found the addresses began moving USDT in mid‑2021, increased high‑value transfers through early 2023, and then became largely inactive after February 2023.
The second anomaly concerns balance concentration and duration. The sanctioned wallets carried large, sustained balances over multi‑year windows, which Nominis contrasts with earlier clusters tied to Iran that tended to spread funds across many wallets and cycle holdings quickly.
A third point of interest is direct transactional exposure to Huobi, now HTX, and to Huione Group infrastructure. Nominis identified a root wallet in the cluster that routed funds to Huobi/HTX and onward to addresses the firm associates with Huione, and it reported similar flow patterns on those platforms since 2021.
Nominis described timing of activity as a fourth anomaly. The firm reported a separate HTX deposit address received about $600,000 from wallets it links to the Central Bank of Iran, while the broader pattern of trades on the involved addresses aligned with Asia‑based operating hours rather than Tehran business hours.
The fifth anomaly involves smaller exchange interactions and a 2025 scam overlap. One sanctioned wallet made periodic small transfers to Bitfinex‑linked addresses, received a $5 inbound transaction that Nominis flagged as possible testing behavior, and later appeared in a 2025 scam‑related flow.
The $344 million in USDT was frozen at the request of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote on X that the United States has seized nearly $500 million in Iranian cryptocurrency under Operation Epic Fury and that Treasury will continue efforts to degrade Tehran’s ability to generate, move and repatriate funds. The OFAC action on the frozen USDT is the largest single on‑chain enforcement step reported in the campaign so far, following earlier January sanctions tied to alleged IRGC dealings.
Levi warned that static address blacklists can miss on‑chain behavior changes by state‑linked groups. He wrote that the patterns in the Nominis analysis highlight limitations in current sanction methods even as targeting stablecoin flows has become a common enforcement tool.
