Chainalysis: addresses linked to Iran, Russia, North Korea, and other US-sanctioned entities received $100B+ in crypto in 2025, almost 8x the amount in 2024
Blacklisted entities handled $100 billion in crypto in 2025, financing terrorism and weapons — Iran, Russia, North Korea …
Context & Ripple Effects
Chainalysis’ earlier coverage has tracked sanctioned crypto activity as a growing share of illicit flows: sanctioned jurisdictions and entities received $15.8B in 2024, while 2022 analysis attributed 44% of illicit volume to sanctioned-entity activity.
The new figure sharply extends that pattern. It also sits alongside prior reporting on Iran-linked exchange flows and North Korean crypto theft, showing that sanctions exposure spans both transaction networks and illicitly acquired assets.
First-order effects
- Compliance, exchange-risk, and investigative teams face a substantially larger set of flows linked to sanctioned entities, raising the operational importance of address screening and transaction tracing.
- The reported increase strengthens the case for Chainalysis and similar monitoring firms as key infrastructure for identifying exposure to sanctioned crypto activity.
Second-order effects
- Centralized exchanges and DeFi platforms may face greater pressure to strengthen controls around wallets and services with direct or downstream sanctioned exposure, potentially increasing friction for higher-risk transfers.
- The scale of sanctioned-linked balances could complicate decisions by governments and institutions considering crypto holdings, because provenance and recoverability become more material than headline asset balances.
Third-order effects
- If sanctioned-entity use continues to outpace broader illicit-crypto growth, sanctions enforcement will increasingly depend on blockchain analytics and on whether intermediaries can act on those signals across fragmented on-chain venues.
- The pattern points to a more bifurcated crypto market: regulated venues absorb higher compliance costs while illicit actors seek less-controlled routing, including rapidly expanding DeFi services.
The trend: Crypto’s growing role in sanctions evasion and illicit-finance networks is making transaction provenance a core constraint on the sector’s institutional adoption and regulation.