780 OFAC-Sanctioned Crypto Addresses: Bitcoin Beats Ethereum 5 to 1

Bitcoin carries 513 of OFAC's 780 sanctioned crypto addresses, more than five times Ethereum's 97, with Tron a close second at 127.

You run an address through a sanctions check expecting an Ethereum hit, because most AML coverage gets built around Ethereum first. The data says otherwise. Pull every entry out of Treasury's crypto sanctions list and Bitcoin accounts for two out of every three addresses on it, not Ethereum.

That gap has been there for years. OFAC doesn't publish a chain-by-chain tally anywhere on its own site, so the shape of the list stays hidden unless someone sits down and counts it by hand.

Why Does Bitcoin Dominate OFAC's Crypto Sanctions List?

The committed OFAC dataset, data/ofac-sdn.json, holds 780 sanctioned crypto addresses pulled from the SDN list. Bitcoin addresses make up 513 of them, 65.8% of the total. Tron is a distant second at 127, 16.3%. Ethereum sits third at 97, 12.4%, despite being the chain most sanctions-screening products are built to cover first.

Age explains most of it. OFAC has been designating Bitcoin addresses since 2018, years before it touched a smart-contract chain, and ransomware payments, darknet markets, and the earliest crypto-linked drug and arms cases ran almost exclusively on Bitcoin. Each of those cases adds a cluster of addresses at once, not one at a time. A single ransomware group's wallet rotation can add a dozen addresses in one SDN update.

Darknet markets built the biggest single clusters. A market seizure typically surfaces every wallet the operator ever rotated funds through, and prosecutors tend to list all of them in the same designation rather than trickle them out over separate actions. Bitcoin absorbed that pattern for the better part of a decade before any other chain carried comparable transaction volume worth sanctioning.

Tron Edges Out Ethereum for Second Place

Tron's 127 addresses, 16.3% of the list, outnumber Ethereum's 97 by 30. That's a newer trend. Treasury's October 1, 2026 update added seven more Tron addresses tied to individually named people under its TCO and SDGT programs, continuing a pattern that's shown up repeatedly through 2026: Tron is where USDT moves for the actors OFAC is designating right now, and USDT on Tron is cheap and fast to move in volume.

Ethereum's 97 addresses skew toward a different kind of case. The August 8, 2022 designation of Tornado Cash listed 44 Ethereum addresses in a single action, the first time OFAC sanctioned a piece of software instead of a person or entity. One designation like that moves Ethereum's count more than years of individual wallet additions would.

Fourteen Chains Share the Remaining 43 Addresses

Below the top three, the list gets thin fast. Litecoin holds 10 addresses, Monero 8, Bitcoin Cash 7, and 7 more carry no identifiable chain tag at all. Dash and Zcash each hold 3. Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Gold, Solana, Ripple, and Verge each appear exactly once. Combined, those eleven smaller chains account for 43 addresses, 5.5% of the list.

Solana's single entry is worth sitting with. One designated address out of 780, against a chain that carries tens of thousands of scam and drainer reports elsewhere. A formal OFAC designation and a risk flag are not the same test, and a chain can be thin on one while loaded on the other.

What Should This Change About How You Screen a Wallet?

If your sanctions check only covers Ethereum, it's missing 86% of OFAC's own list by address count. A Bitcoin address, a Tron address, and an Ethereum address all carry the same legal exposure once that address is designated. Treasury doesn't rank its own list by chain. A screening tool that does is choosing which 86% to ignore.

Checking 780 addresses across 14 chains by hand before every transaction isn't something anyone actually does. Screen the address with Plastron instead, which runs the full OFAC list alongside a Bitcoin-specific check and a Tron-specific check, and returns a dated verdict no matter which of the 14 chains the address sits on.

Methodology

Every count in this piece comes from data/ofac-sdn.json, the committed OFAC SDN mirror, which holds 780 entries as of this snapshot. Each entry carries a chain field; counts per chain were read directly from that field and divided by 780 to produce each percentage, rounded to one decimal place. The dataset is sourced from the 0xB10C OFAC mirror and refreshed independently of the entity-type corpus in data/known-addresses.json, which this piece doesn't draw from.

The Tornado Cash, Tron TCO, and Solana scam-report figures are cited from the named public sources above and aren't part of the committed dataset count.

FAQ

Which blockchain has the most OFAC-sanctioned addresses?

Bitcoin, by a wide margin. It carries 513 of the 780 addresses on the committed OFAC dataset, 65.8% of the total, more than five times Ethereum's 97.

How many Ethereum addresses are on OFAC's sanctions list?

97, 12.4% of the 780-address list, putting Ethereum third behind Bitcoin and Tron despite being the chain most compliance tooling is built around first.

Why does Tron have more sanctioned addresses than Ethereum?

Tron's 127 addresses reflect how often USDT on Tron shows up in recent OFAC actions, including the October 1, 2026 designation of seven Tron addresses tied to named individuals under the TCO and SDGT programs.

Does a low address count mean a chain is low-risk?

No. Solana has exactly one OFAC-designated address, but a formal sanctions designation and a broader risk flag measure different things, and a chain can be thin on one while carrying real exposure on the other.