Two billion crypto lives behind the Trump family’s token and Iran’s sanctions evasion engine
Reuters tracked $2.3bn in Iranian Nobitex transactions from 2023 to Tron and BNB Chain, blockchains founded by two prominent early backers of World Liberty Financial. No party in the WLF has ever been accused of knowing about it.
A Reuters investigation published Monday documents that Nobitex, the largest crypto exchange in Iran, has processed at least $2.3bn as of 2023. on the Tron and BNB Chain blockchains. Tron was founded by Justin Sun.
BNB Chain was founded by Binance, Changpeng Zhao’s exchange. Both Sun and Zhao are two prominent early backers of World Liberty Financial, a crypto company co-founded by Donald Trump and his family. There is no suggestion that the Trump family knew about Nobitex’s use of any network.
A Reuters breakdown of public blockchain data, taken from Arkham, puts nearly $2bn of Nobitex flows on Tron and $317m on BNB Chain as of 1 January 2023, and $22.6m on BNB Chain and $550,000 on Tron since the Iran war began in February.
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Four crypto analysts are called counting noise; independent investigator Rich Sanders said the true number was likely higher, as public flows were traced to known Nobitex addresses and the exchange agreed to change addresses to avoid tracking.
Principals’ positions on all issues are on record. The White House’s response, from spokeswoman Anna Kelly, described the article as ‘an outrageous attempt to link President Trump to the Iranian banking system’ that was ‘absolutely laughable’.
A spokesperson for World Liberty said the company ‘has no relationship with Nobitex and follows US law’, adding that ‘World Liberty does not own, operate, or control Tron in any way, and has no authority over what is done on it’. Nobitex said any illegal funds passed through the trade ‘without management’s consent or awareness’.
A Tron spokesperson said the network is a ‘technology provider’ that can ‘monitor and investigate every user and every transaction’. Binance said it is the ‘primary contributor and incubator’ of the BNB Chain rather than its operator.
The caveat of Binance’s business structure lies within its long track record. Abu Dhabi documents reviewed by Reuters show Zhao as the sole shareholder listed in BNB Chain Technology Holding Limited, the entity to which BNB Chain’s operations were transferred in 2023.
A 2022 Reuters report found nearly $7.8bn in crypto flows between Nobitex and Binance from 2018 to 2022, nearly three-quarters from traditional Tron assets, with Nobitex actively encouraging clients to use Tron to trade ‘without risking sanctions’.
The Trump family’s trading position in WLF is a structural fact under report. Sun’s portfolio of four billion WLFI tokens is worth about $266m, according to Reuters calculations; Binance now holds $3.8bn of the Trump family token.
Abu Dhabi’s MGX bought a $2bn stake in Binance in early 2025 and announced that the transaction would be settled in WLF’s USD1 stablecoin. Trump’s October 2025 pardon for Zhao, who is clearing his charge of failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program, is consistent with that trade timeline.
Lawyers for Binance and Zhao said there was no connection between the USD1 deal and the pardon.
The small money laundering arc is now well written. Mix it up multiple Nobitex wallet addresses at the request of the National Bureau of Israel for Counter Terror Financing.
Elliptic and similar Iran experts reported in January that the Central Bank of Iran, which was sanctioned by the US in 2019 for allegedly financing the IRGC and Hezbollah, bought more than $500m of tether through Tron between November 2024 and June 2025, of which about $347m went to Nobitex in the first half of 2025.
The central bank also converted the holdings into other coins and transferred them across the BNB Chain to hide the trail.
What the United States did not do was punish Nobitex itself. Reuters notes clearly that it could not determine the reason. Watchdog Public Citizen Group, in the same reportcalled the WLF/Binance/Iran chain a ‘controversy coin’ and pressed for a Treasury Department and DOJ investigation.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jack Reed have separately called for an official investigation into WLF’s sanctions control, which the company said was ‘the highest in the industry’.
The reported principals were already at loggerheads before the Reuters investigation. The sun sued World Liberty in April on suspected frozen goods; The WLF was challenged in early Mayallegations of defamation.
Blockchain data does not, from an investigative standpoint, prove systematic behavior. It notes that the two people most exposed to the rise of the Trump family’s crypto company are the builders of two networks through which Iran’s largest sanctioned flow line operates.
