Crypto exchange Binance may have funded Iranian entities, reports say

Shortly after Donald Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder, last fall, company employees revealed the cryptocurrency exchange may have funded Iranian entities with billions of dollars, according to a report by the New York Times.The discovery was made by a group of internal Binance investigators, who reportedly found that people in Iran had accessed more than 1,500 accounts on the crypto platform. Two of those accounts allegedly saw $1.7bn move to Iranian-backed groups that included Yemen’s Houthi militants throughout 2024 and 2025, according to the Wall Street Journal.The company investigators say they reported those transactions to Binance’s executives, but then were reportedly disciplined. At least four of the employees were reportedly fired or suspended on allegations that included “violations of company protocol” in regards to the handling of client data.In a statement to the Guardian, a Binance spokesperson said the company “did not violate sanctions laws in respect of the transactions described”. The spokesperson also denied that internal investigators were dismissed for raising the discovery. “No investigator was dismissed for raising compliance concerns or for reporting potential sanctions issues,” reads the statement.Zhao founded Binance in 2017 and it went onto become the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. In 2023, Zhao pled guilty to money laundering and resigned from the company. He was sentenced to four months in prison. As part of the guilty plea, Zhao agreed to pay a $50m fine and was barred from any involvement in the business.In October, Trump pardoned Zhao, downplaying the crimes. Trump’s family crypto business, World Liberty Financial, has worked with Binance and Zhao attended a conference at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month.“They say what he did was not even a crime. It wasn’t a crime,” Trump told reporters in October. “That he was persecuted by the Biden administration and so I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people.”Binance also pled guilty in 2023 and agreed to internal monitoring and a criminal fine of nearly $1.81bn, along with another $2.51bn order of forfeiture to settle three criminal charges. The company also vowed to go after bad actors who used its platform for financial transactions, including customers from Iran.The Iranian transactions came to light inside the company before Trump’s pardon, according to the New York Times. The entities that reportedly received the funds include a chief foreign adversary that the Trump administration has reportedly been planning to strike.The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.