Binance-Iran investigation - BitcoinMarket.net

A number that has nearly doubled in silence. Employees who, according to reporting, were pushed out shortly after flagging what they found. And in the background, a presidential pardon and a business deal with the sitting US president's family company. This isn't a rerun of an old story. It's a different story, with a different number — and a detail the earlier reporting never had.

From $850 Million to $1.7 Billion: The New York Times' New Figure

In May 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that Binance had processed roughly $850 million in transactions tied to Iranian users between 2018 and 2022, allegedly circumventing US sanctions. We covered it too (see our earlier article on Binance and the WSJ allegations): CEO Richard Teng called the reporting "fundamentally inaccurate."

That story stopped at $850 million. On February 23, 2026, the New York Times — citing internal company documents — put the figure far higher: $1.7 billion. According to the paper's reporting, Binance's own internal investigators had identified more than 1,500 accounts tied to Iranian users that reportedly kept operating on the platform long after being flagged as high-risk.

The jump from $850 million to $1.7 billion isn't a rounding error. It's a doubling of a figure that, back in 2023, was already enough to trigger weeks of headlines and a US Treasury Department review. If the documents cited by the NYT hold up, the question is no longer "did Binance have Iranian users" — it's "for how long, and who inside the company knew."

Who Found the Transactions — and What Happened to Them

This is where the 2026 story diverges sharply from 2023. According to the New York Times' reporting, this wasn't simply a compliance issue left unaddressed: at least four employees on the team responsible for flagging suspicious transactions were reportedly fired or suspended in the months following their internal reports on Iranian accounts.

This needs to be stated with the caution it deserves: the documents cited by the NYT do not definitively establish a direct causal link between the internal reports and the firings — it's the timeline, as reconstructed by the paper, that raises the question. As of this writing, we are not aware of any public statement from Binance addressing the specific personnel cases cited by the New York Times. If and when one arrives, we will update this article.

What is verifiable is the context: a company that was already the subject of a journalistic investigation into Iranian users in 2023, that in 2026 sees — again from internal sources — a tripled figure emerge, and in which, according to the same source, the people who raised their hands internally did not keep their jobs.

Timeline: From Internal Reports to CZ's Pardon

Laying out the dates helps explain why this story carries different weight than it did three years ago.

Taken individually, each of these milestones is a documented fact with its own source. Lined up together, they form a timeline that deserves to be described for exactly what it is: a chronological correlation, not proof of a causal link between the pardon, World Liberty Financial's business dealings, and how the Iran case was handled internally. No source cited in this article claims a direct connection exists between these events — but the fact that they occurred within months of each other is, on its own, something readers have a right to know.

World Liberty Financial, the Trump Family, and Binance

World Liberty Financial is the decentralized finance (DeFi) project launched in 2024 with the involvement of the Trump family. During 2025, according to available reporting, the project struck commercial agreements with Binance — the same exchange whose founder received a presidential pardon in the same period.

There is, to date, no public evidence directly linking the commercial agreements between World Liberty Financial and Binance to the decision to pardon Changpeng Zhao, nor to how internal reports on Iranian accounts were handled. It must be said just as clearly: the temporal overlap between a company tied to the president's family doing business with Binance, a presidential pardon for Binance's founder, and a journalistic investigation into a sanctionable-transaction figure that nearly doubled, is the kind of tangle that in any other industry would draw significant additional public scrutiny.

Binance's Response

As noted, Binance responded to the 2023 WSJ investigation through CEO Richard Teng, calling the reporting "fundamentally inaccurate." As of this writing, Binance has made no specific public statement regarding the new $1.7 billion figure reported by the New York Times in February 2026, nor regarding the firing of the four employees cited in the same investigation.

This article will be updated as soon as Binance provides an official, specific response to the New York Times' findings. For fairness, we note here that the company has consistently maintained publicly that it applies compliance and anti-money-laundering policies in line with international standards.

The Legal Picture: OFAC Sanctions and the Zanjani Case

To understand why transactions with Iran are a legal problem and not just a reputational one, it helps to recall the sanctions framework. The European Union has maintained Iran-specific sanctions since December 2012. The United States, through the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), maintains its own separate sanctions regime.

One name that recurs in the context of Iran-crypto sanctions is Babak Zanjani, the Iranian businessman placed on OFAC's Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list on April 13, 2013, and removed from it in January 2016, following the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA). Zanjani was sentenced to death in Iran in 2016 in a case tied to roughly $2.7 billion in unreturned state oil funds; the sentence was commuted in 2024. His case, separate from the transactions described by the WSJ and NYT, is often cited in debates over Iran and financial sanctions because it shows just how complex and shifting the sanctioned status of Iranian counterparties can be over time — an account can be sanctioned one moment and not the next, which makes due diligence for crypto platforms far from simple, but no less mandatory for it.

The fact that the accounts cited by the New York Times reportedly remained active for an extended period after being flagged internally — if confirmed in detail — raises a specific compliance question: not whether Binance was aware in the abstract of Iran-related risk (it was; the 2023 WSJ investigation had already made that public), but whether and how it acted once its own employees flagged concrete accounts.

Conclusion: The Open Questions

Three questions remain open today that no public source has yet fully answered: why the figure for Iran-linked transactions rose from $850 million to $1.7 billion within three years; what exactly happened to the employees who, according to the New York Times, flagged the suspicious accounts; and whether the temporal overlap between Changpeng Zhao's pardon and the deals between World Liberty Financial and Binance carried any weight in either decision — while reiterating that no evidence establishes a direct link.

We will continue following this story and will update this article with any official responses from Binance, World Liberty Financial, or the White House.

For readers wondering what this means for an everyday user with funds on Binance: none of the investigations cited here concern the safety of individual European users' funds or the exchange's compliance with the EU's MiCA rules, which remain a separate, separately regulated topic (we covered it in our guide to [MiCA-certified exchanges](/guide/)). This investigation is about something else: the internal governance of a company handling hundreds of billions of dollars in volume, and how it handles — or fails to handle — warnings coming from its own staff.

Sources cited: New York Times (February 23, 2026); Wall Street Journal (May 2023); treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jl1893; Iran International; Times of Israel; The Block.