262 bitcoin addresses are on the US sanctions list. These are the 65 names they belong to.

The US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control keeps a list called the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list. If you are on it, US people and businesses are generally prohibited from dealing with you, and any property of yours within US reach is blocked.

Since 2018 that list has carried wallet addresses. Not as a separate crypto blacklist, but as another identifier sitting alongside a passport number or a date of birth, under the heading Digital Currency Address.

We downloaded the full list on 16 October 2026 and counted. Bitcoin addresses appear 262 times, attached to 65 names. Forty six of those names are individual people. Nineteen are entities: exchanges, mixers, marketplaces and front companies.

The names carrying the most bitcoin addresses

• SUEX OTC, S.R.O., an entity, 14 addresses, cyber programme
• Wu Huihui, an individual, 13 addresses, North Korea programme
• Alex Adrianus Martinus Peijnenburg, an individual, 13 addresses, illicit drugs programme
• Chatex, an entity, 13 addresses, cyber programme
• Li Jiadong, an individual, 12 addresses, North Korea and cyber programmes
• Hydra Market, an entity, 12 addresses, cyber programme
• Chen Zhi, an individual, 12 addresses, transnational criminal organisation programme
• Anton Nikolaeyvich Andreyev, an individual, 12 addresses, cyber and election programmes
• Wang Yunhe, an individual, 11 addresses, cyber programme
• Matthew Simon Grimm, an individual, 11 addresses, illicit drugs programme
• Blender.io, an entity, 11 addresses, cyber programme
• Behrouz Parsarad, an individual, 9 addresses, illicit drugs programme
• Tian Yinyin, an individual, 8 addresses, North Korea and cyber programmes
• Secondeye Solution, an entity, 8 addresses, cyber and election programmes
• Ivan Gennadievich Kondratiev, an individual, 8 addresses, cyber programme

A name carrying more addresses is not necessarily a bigger operator. It usually means investigators were able to attribute more wallets to one person, which happens when somebody reuses infrastructure or when an exchange hands over records.

A designation is an executive action, not a criminal conviction. None of the descriptions above should be read as a finding of guilt by any court.

What the programme codes mean

The programme code is the legal authority a designation was made under, and it tells you what the US government says the person was doing.

The cyber authority is the most common by a distance. It comes from Executive Order 13694 as amended, which covers malicious cyber-enabled activity. Ransomware infrastructure, cash-out services and the exchanges accused of laundering proceeds sit here. SUEX, Chatex, Hydra Market and Blender.io are all designated under it.

The illicit drugs authority, Executive Order 14059, is second. These are designations tied to drug trafficking, and the presence of bitcoin addresses reflects how synthetic drug supply chains now take payment.

The North Korea authority covers names associated with moving funds on behalf of the DPRK. A transnational criminal organisation authority, a Russia authority and the terrorism designation each account for a handful more.

Several names carry two codes at once. Andreyev and Secondeye Solution are listed under both cyber and election interference authorities, which is a reminder that these categories describe legal powers rather than tidy criminal specialisms.

Bitcoin leads, but it is not alone

The same list carries addresses for other assets. Counted the same way on the same day:

• Bitcoin, 262 addresses
• Tron, 87
• Ethereum, 87
• Tether, 43
• Litecoin, 8
• Monero, 6
• Dash, 5
• Zcash, 3
• Bitcoin Cash, 2
• USD Coin, 2
• Solana, 2
• Dogecoin, 2

Bitcoin's lead is partly age. It has been around longer, so more old cases attach to it. The Tron and Tether figures are the ones that have grown most in recent years, which matches where cheap, fast dollar transfers actually happen now.

The six Monero addresses are worth a note. Monero is designed so an outside observer cannot follow payments, which is exactly why there are six of them rather than two hundred.

What being on the list actually does

This is the part misunderstood in both directions.

Listing an address does not freeze it. There is no switch at the Treasury that stops a bitcoin address receiving or sending. The coins keep moving if whoever holds the keys wants them to.

What the designation does is make it unlawful for US people and businesses to deal with that address. In practice enforcement happens at the edges, where crypto meets the regulated financial system: exchanges, custodians, payment processors and banks screen against the list and block, freeze or report. Analytics firms fold the addresses into their screening products, so the restriction travels further than the list itself.

The result is that a listed address is not seized. It is made radioactive. Anyone wanting to turn its contents into ordinary money has to find a counterparty willing to risk a US enforcement action.

Checking an address yourself

The list is public, free and machine readable. OFAC publishes the full SDN list as a CSV and as XML, and the digital currency addresses sit in the remarks field of each record. You do not need a paid analytics subscription to check whether a specific address appears on it.

The caveat is that the list names addresses the US government has attributed to a designated person. It does not name every address that has ever touched one. Sitting two hops from a listed address is a very different thing legally from being on the list, and anyone telling you otherwise is usually selling compliance software.