We've spent years hearing about how crypto is going to replace traditional money. Now you can walk into a store, pay with stablecoins and the merchant receives regular fiat. The customer uses crypto. The merchant gets dollars. Visa processes the payment. So we've basically reinvented the debit card, just with a blockchain somewhere in the middle. And somehow this is being celebrated as mass adoption.

If merchants never touch crypto, is this really adoption or just another way to convert crypto into regular money?

Binance dubbed him a “high-value customer,” and he was making suspicious trades on the world’s largest crypto exchange.

The first red flag was transactions with an Iranian money changer. Then U.S. and Swiss law-enforcement officials inquired with the exchange about one of the customer’s accounts that had been repeatedly accessed from Tehran.

It turned out the high-value customer was the manager of a crypto firm run by Babak Zanjani, a longtime financier for Iran’s regime who was directing a secret payment network for the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to U.S. and Israeli authorities.

Given the client’s status, which entitled him to lower fees and personalized service, internal Binance investigators who looked into the accounts needed senior approvals to kick him out, internal records showed. Binance said it blocked the accounts in late 2025 and removed the last of his accounts in May this year.

The Wall Street Journal reported in May that Iran used Binance as a backdoor to evade America’s financial sanctions. Zanjani spearheaded those efforts, using a network of accounts and shell companies to make $850 million in total transactions on Binance, mostly via his crypto firm’s own corporate account.

A previously unreported Binance document, along with other internal records, reveal the nuts and bolts of how Zanjani’s network used the exchange to move money against the wishes of Western governments.

They detail a tangle of 21 trading accounts owned by individuals and firms described by U.S. authorities and the Binance investigators as part of Zanjani’s network, including a set of companies operating in the open in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. At least $67 million flowed out of two of these accounts to digital wallets connected to the IRGC, the document said.

The 80-page report, viewed by the Journal, was prepared by Binance in April in response to a request from the U.A.E.’s financial intelligence unit.

Zanjani’s network established its presence on the exchange after Binance pleaded guilty in 2023 to U.S. anti-money-laundering violations and sanctions breaches. Binance’s owner, Changpeng Zhao, who spent four months in jail and resigned as chief executive, was pardoned by President Trump last October.