Reuters traced $2.3bn in Iranian exchange Nobitex’s flows since 2023 to Tron and BNB Chain, the blockchains established by World Liberty Financial’s two most prominent early backers. No party at WLF has been accused of knowing about it.
A Reuters investigation published on Monday documents that Nobitex, Iran’s largest crypto exchange, has processed at least $2.3bn since 2023 on the Tron and BNB Chain blockchains. Tron was founded by Justin Sun.
BNB Chain was developed by Binance, the exchange owned by Changpeng Zhao. Both Sun and Zhao are the two most prominent early backers of World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm co-founded by Donald Trump and his family. There is no suggestion that the Trump family knew about Nobitex’s use of either network.
Reuters’ breakdown of public blockchain data, sourced from Arkham, puts about $2bn of the Nobitex flow on Tron and $317m on BNB Chain since 1 January 2023, with $22.6m on BNB Chain and $550,000 via Tron since the Iran war began in February.
Four crypto analysts called the calculation sound; independent investigator Rich Sanders said the true figure was probably higher, since public flows are visible only for known Nobitex addresses and the exchange has admitted to switching addresses to avoid tracing.
The principals’ positions on the news are all on the record. The White House response, from spokeswoman Anna Kelly, described the article as ‘bizarre attempts to link President Trump to Iran’s banking system’ that were ‘totally laughable’.
A spokeswoman for World Liberty said the company ‘has no relationship with Nobitex and follows U.S. law’, adding that ‘World Liberty does not own, operate, or control Tron in any way, and has no authority over transactions conducted on it’. Nobitex said any illicit funds passed through the exchange ‘without management approval or awareness’.
A Tron spokeswoman said the network ‘is a technology provider’ that cannot ‘monitor and investigate every user and every transaction’. Binance said it was ‘an initial contributor and incubator’ of BNB Chain rather than its operator.
Binance’s corporate-structure caveat sits inside a longer record. Abu Dhabi filings reviewed by Reuters show Zhao as the sole listed shareholder of BNB Chain Technology Holding Limited, the entity to which BNB Chain’s operations were transferred in 2023.
Reuters’ 2022 reporting found about $7.8bn in crypto flowed between Nobitex and Binance from 2018 to 2022, roughly three-quarters in Tron’s native asset, with Nobitex actively encouraging clients to use Tron to trade ‘without endangering assets due to sanctions’.
The Trump family’s commercial position in WLF is the structural fact underneath the reporting. Sun’s portfolio of 4 billion WLFI tokens is worth roughly $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 the transaction would be settled in WLF’s USD1 stablecoin. Trump’s October 2025 pardon of Zhao, wiping his federal conviction for failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering programme, sits alongside that commercial timeline.
Binance and Zhao’s lawyers have said there was no connection between the USD1 deal and the pardon.
The narrower money-laundering arc is now well-documented. Tether froze multiple Nobitex wallet addresses at the request of Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing.
Elliptic and the same two Iran specialists reported in January that the Central Bank of Iran, sanctioned by the US in 2019 over alleged IRGC and Hezbollah financing, bought more than $500m of tether via Tron between November 2024 and June 2025, of which roughly $347m was routed to Nobitex in the first half of 2025.
The central bank also converted holdings into other coins and moved them across BNB Chain to obscure the trail.
What the United States has not done is sanction Nobitex itself. Reuters notes plainly that it could not determine the reason. Watchdog group Public Citizen, in a parallel report, has called the WLF/Binance/Iran chain a ‘conflict coin’ and pressed for Treasury and DOJ investigations.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jack Reed have separately sought formal probes into WLF’s sanctions controls, which the company has said are ‘the highest standard in the industry’.
The named principals had already fallen out before the Reuters investigation. Sun sued World Liberty in April over allegedly frozen assets; WLF countersued in early May, alleging defamation.
The blockchain data does not, on the investigation’s own framing, prove coordinated conduct. It documents that two of the people most exposed to the financial upside of the Trump family’s crypto company are also the architects of the two networks that Iran’s largest sanctioned-flow conduit runs on.
