Report links Iranian flows to Binance

Internal compliance documents from cryptocurrency exchange Binance, cited by the Wall Street Journal and summarized by Haaretz, describe extensive transaction flows allegedly connected to Iranian businessman Babak Zanjani. According to these materials, Zanjani routed about $850 million through Binance over a two‑year period. The reports say some of these transactions occurred as recently as the last month, indicating that the activity extended into the current period covered by the internal review.

The Wall Street Journal’s account attributes its figures and characterizations directly to these Binance compliance documents and the written assessments of the exchange’s own investigators. The reporting presents the scale and timing of the transactions as they appear in those internal materials, without asserting any independent legal conclusions by external regulators or courts.

Within the internal Binance reports, investigators assessed that about half of the approximately $850 million in transactions associated with Zanjani were tied to financing Iran’s military networks. That estimate amounts to roughly $425 million, based on the figures cited in the documents. The materials characterize this portion of the flows as being linked to entities aligned with Iran’s military structure.

The compliance assessments, as reported, highlight patterns in the flagged accounts that investigators viewed as consistent with sanctions‑evasion and money‑laundering activity. These patterns, and the investigators’ interpretation of them, underpin the conclusion that significant sums were connected to military‑related financing channels.

According to the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on the internal materials, Binance’s compliance staff described the relevant accounts as part of a money‑laundering network used to finance the Iranian regime. The reports state that the network moved funds to regime‑connected entities, using Binance’s platform as a conduit for these flows.

The characterization focuses on how the accounts operated in aggregate, rather than on isolated transactions. The internal reports cited by the Journal present the activity as organized and recurring over the two‑year period, with continued movement of money into the period identified as “the last month” in the investigators’ notes.

The narrative presented in the coverage is grounded in the specific internal compliance materials that reporters reviewed. Those documents provide the quantitative estimates of total volume routed through Binance, the share investigators linked to Iran’s military networks, and the indication that transfers remained active in the most recent month referenced.

At the same time, the reporting makes clear that these are internal evaluations by Binance’s own investigators. The articles do not describe formal enforcement findings or sanctions decisions by government authorities arising from these particular flows. Instead, they relay how Binance’s compliance function internally assessed the risks, scale and purpose of the transactions associated with Zanjani and related accounts.