“The Only Thing That Has Changed Is the Path to Gold”

Weeks after designation, Iran’s sanctioned crypto exchanges became gold dealers

Editor's Note: The underlying research and blockchain analysis in this article were originally published by Applied Technology Solutions (ATS), a Meridian3 joint venture partner, on September 14, 2026. (link)

Between June and August 2026, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. By Treasury’s own figures, they handled roughly three-quarters of the country’s digital-asset inflows in 2025. Treasury also declared every Iranian digital-asset exchange a blocked Iranian financial institution. Within weeks, each of the four largest designated exchanges was selling gold. Not gold-themed marketing: gold accounts, gold tokens, gold on leverage, and loans against gold. One of them says the metal behind its product is held at a bank the U.S. Treasury designated in 2018.

That is the subject of this piece. A narrow and new corner of Iran’s gold market: a set of designated crypto exchanges, a designated bank, and offshore brokers like Trendo that have been selling gold and crypto to Iranian customers from the same platform. The pieces are visible in the exchanges’ own announcements, in Iranian corporate filings, and on the blockchain. Nobody appears to be looking at them together.

Weeks After Designation, Gold

Bitpin was designated by OFAC on June 2. On August 16 it launched Zarpin, “an online platform for buying and selling melted gold that, backed by Bitpin, closes the distance to gold investment to the minimum,” with physical delivery promised for a later phase. Aban Tether was designated on August 7. On August 20, it introduced GoldBox: three percent annual return above the gold price “with the help of an arbitrage strategy,” instant withdrawal, instant conversion between gold and stablecoins, purchase by installment, and loans of up to one billion toman, roughly ten thousand dollars, against a GoldBox balance. Wallex, designated June 2, posted a daily “RWA market” update on September 3, quoting Tether Gold alongside its own digital silver, copper and oil tokens. Nobitex, designated June 2 and by Treasury’s account, the channel for more than half of Iranian digital-asset inflows in 2025, offered 10x leverage on gold on September 5, and the same on stablecoins the day after. The four exchanges also reach an audience. A quick look at their official Telegram channels adds up to roughly 800,000 subscribers. That is a cursory count, not a study, and it still comes to more than three-quarters of a million people receiving gold offers from designated financial institutions.

Aban Tether’s post closes with a sentence that describes the whole development better than any analyst could:

Closing lines of Aban Tether’s GoldBox announcement, August 20, 2026, thirteen days after its designation

The four products are different things, and what a customer actually holds depends on which one they bought. Zarpin is a gold account: the balance is a ledger entry and the platform holds, or says it holds, metal in a vault. Wallex sells Tether Gold, a token issued offshore by a company whose terms prohibit Iranian holders; the on-chain holder is Wallex, not the customer. Nobitex’s 10x product is a leveraged contract with no metal and no token behind it. GoldBox promises to pay more than gold does, and no vault full of gold can make that promise, so a GoldBox balance is not gold held for the customer. It is a claim on the exchange, priced in gold.

Trendo, and the Industry It Belongs To

Gold and crypto on one platform is not new to Iranian customers. Offshore brokers have offered exactly that for years, and Trendo is one of them. Its corporate profile describes it as “from forex, gold, energy, to crypto in one platform,” and its Android app is listed under forex, gold, and stablecoins. It holds a license in Mauritius, a company in Armenia, a payment agent in Cyprus, and a support line in Dubai. Trendo offers leverage of up to 1:2000, and claims more than a million active traders. Twelve of the sixteen staff on its corporate profile list Iran as their home. In practice, it is a Persian-language broker with rial deposits, an app on Iran’s domestic app stores, gold as a headline product, and customers who fund their accounts in stablecoins bought on Iran’s largest exchanges.

Infrastructure attributed to Trendo on the blockchain has exchanged millions of dollars in stablecoins with wallets attributed to Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin, and Aban Tether, across thousands of transfers. The activity continued after the June 2 and August 7 designations. The number is a floor, and the real figure is undoubtedly much higher. Attribution of a broker’s deposit infrastructure is never complete, but what the blockchain undoubtedly shows is cryptocurrency moving between a gold-and-crypto broker and four designated exchanges that now sell gold themselves.

Trendo is not an outlier. It is one firm in a new industry. A surface-level look at Iran-facing brokers that sell gold and take crypto as a deposit rail produced more than a dozen hits. One has run a contest open only to traders in Iran, with Iranian-made cars as prizes. One calls itself a specialized gold broker. Two have gone further than a leveraged gold contract funded with crypto: one lists Tether Gold itself as a leveraged instrument, and another introduced a perpetual gold contract in February 2026 that it files under cryptocurrencies and trades around the clock. A broker-comparison site that says it tested more than a hundred brokers with real-money accounts ranks the best gold brokers available in Iran. Every one of them solves the same problem for an Iranian customer, which is how to get rials into a dollar-denominated gold position, and the designated exchanges are the on-ramp.

The Gold Goes Where the Central Bank Says

The last question is where the metal behind these products ends up, and the answer does not depend on the exchanges. Iran’s central bank requires every licensed online-gold platform to store customer metal at a bank it approves. The banks it has approved or is considering are Bank Kargoshaee, Bank Saderat and Karafarin. All three are on the U.S. sanctions list.

WallGold, the gold service Wallex launched for its own customers, says on its licenses page that their gold is held at Bank Kargoshaee. Kargoshaee is a Tehran bank owned by Bank Melli. Treasury first sanctioned it in 2007 and re-designated it in November 2018 as a Bank Melli subsidiary, citing Bank Melli’s financial services to the IRGC-Qods Force. A customer who buys gold from a designated exchange, through a gold service run by that exchange’s own chief executive, ends up with a claim on metal in a designated bank, because that is where the central bank told the platform to put it.

The Balloon

Treasury has already drawn the map. On August 24, OFAC added Iran’s digital asset sector and its gold sector to the list of sectors covered by Executive Order 13902, which means anyone operating in either one, Iranian or not, can now be sanctioned for it. The two sectors went on the list in the same document on the same day. 

People who work in sanctions have a phrase for what happens next. Squeeze one part of the balloon, and it bulges somewhere else. That is what the record above shows, in real time and in the exchanges’ own words. Treasury named the exchanges in June and August. Within weeks, the exchanges had moved their customers into gold, and the gold had moved into a bank Treasury named in 2018. The sectoral determination says, in effect, that the whole balloon is now in scope. Acting on it means understanding the industry that has grown up in the gap between crypto and gold: the gold services the designated exchanges run, the offshore brokers funded through them, and the banks that hold the metal. The pieces are in plain sight, and so far almost nobody has been looking.

Meridian3 works at the intersection of OSINT, FININT, sanctions, and cryptocurrency investigation. This is an area we continue to examine closely.