How Trump’s crypto project and Iran’s leading exchange ended up using the same industry networks

Iran’s Nobitex has reportedly processed over $2.3 billion through the Tron and BNB Chain networks — blockchain infrastructures founded by backers connected to the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial project.

What appears at first to be routine crypto transaction flow quickly raises deeper questions about the hidden architecture linking politically and economically opposing worlds.

How did an Iranian exchange become intertwined with blockchain systems tied, even indirectly, to Trump-affiliated ventures? And what does this overlap reveal about the blurred lines between global finance, crypto infrastructure, and political influence

2. $2.3 billion in flows linking Iran’s exchange to blockchain systems connected to Trump-aligned crypto ventures—but how?

3. The shared financial networks quietly connecting an Iranian exchange and Trump-linked blockchain infrastructure

4. What connects Iran’s top crypto exchange to blockchain systems backed by figures tied to Trump’s digital empire?

5. How massive crypto flows passed between an Iranian platform and Trump-associated blockchain networks without clear visibility

LONDON - When customers of Iran’s largest crypto exchange needed to move billions of dollars, networks created by two of the industry’s biggest players served as conduits.

And from the early stages of President Donald Trump’s flagship digital currency venture, the same two players lent credibility to the startup?

According to data analysed by Reuters, Iran’s Nobitex exchange has processed at least $2.3 billion since 2023 on Tron and BNB Chain, blockchains established respectively under crypto billionaires Justin Sun and Changpeng Zhao. Users of Tron and BNB Chain pay fees to use the blockchains, which serve as secure, tamper-resistant record keepers.

Iranian money has kept moving through those two digital ledgers during the U.S. and Israeli war against the Islamic Republic.

Sun and Binance, the crypto exchange owned by Zhao, are both prominent backers of World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm co-founded by Trump and his family.

There’s no suggestion that the Trump family knew of Nobitex’s use of Tron and BNB Chain.

Still, the Iran transactions highlight the potentially conflicted position in which the Trumps’ sprawling business interests have placed the U.S. presidency. The family-owned Trump Organization real-estate empire, for example, continues to pursue foreign deals.

The use of the blockchains by institutions in a country the United States is at war with is a “dramatic irony,” said John Reed Stark, a former chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of Internet Enforcement. “The entities doing crypto financing through these platforms are the very ones that the president is trying to defeat in the war.”