According to a Reuters investigation published Friday, Nobitex, Iran’s dominant crypto exchange with roughly 11 million users handling about 70% of the country’s crypto activity, was founded by brothers Ali and Mohammad Kharrazi, whose family is related by marriage to all three of Iran’s supreme leaders.
The Kharrazi family has deep ties to Iran’s political establishment: their grandfather sat on the Assembly of Experts that selects the supreme leader, while their father, Ayatollah Bagher Kharrazi, founded the Iranian political organization Hezbollah and helped staff the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps after the 1979 revolution. Reuters traced the connection through Iranian corporate, government, and banking records, including email addresses used to register Nobitex’s domain in 2017. A separate Elliptic analysis cited by Reuters found that wallets controlled by Iran’s Central Bank sent approximately $347 million to Nobitex in the first half of 2025. Nobitex denied any government affiliation and characterized illicit funds as a “very small fraction” of overall volume.
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