Gold has rallied 28% over the past year from $3,400 to $4,330, outperforming digital rival BTC by over 70 percentage points.

Over the same time period, BTC has suffered an embarrassing 44% decline from $117,000 to $65,000.

In fact, across the past three years, owning so-called “digital gold” instead of the real thing would have returned a couple fewer percentage points despite 36 months of patience.

BTC has crashed off a financial peak, not just a psychological one. It hit an all-time high near $126,200 on October 6, 2025 but has since declined 48%.

Gold achieved its own record shortly after. Spot prices surged to $5,589 per ounce on January 28, 2026, a nominal high that also sat well above the metal’s inflation-adjusted 1980 peak. 

The precious metal has since pulled back from that spike, but it never came close to giving up its year-over-year gain. BTC, in stark contrast, halved.

Boomer gold beats BTC

Evangelists have spent a decade comparing BTC to a global store of value. Its performance over the past few years has certainly stalled that pitch.

The comparison is nowhere close to a financial reality over the past year. Indeed, a dollar saved in gold a year ago is worth about $1.28 today. A dollar saved in BTC is worth about $0.55. 

The metal BTC was supposed to dethrone maintained its strength.

U.S. authorities sanctioned crypto exchanges Shelbit and Aban Tether after alleging that the platforms helped Iran evade restrictions and move funds connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

OFAC targets Shelbit and Aban Tether

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced the sanctions on Aug. 7 as part of Washington’s effort to disrupt Iran’s access to international financial markets.

OFAC accused Shelbit and Aban Tether of facilitating illicit cryptocurrency transactions and sanctions evasion. The agency said the Iranian government relied on exchanges with limited or no regulatory oversight to move digital assets through corporate networks and an online gambling operation.

The sanctions also cover Iranian national Siavash Kayvanpour and companies tied to him in Georgia, Poland and the United Arab Emirates. Treasury described Kayvanpour as the operator of a network of front companies connected to Shelbit.

IRGC-linked addresses sent more than $1 million in crypto to Shelbit, according to Treasury. Shelbit-linked wallets allegedly transferred more than $2 million to addresses controlled by the IRGC.

Wallets owned or controlled by Kayvanpour also sent over $2 million to Nobitex, Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Treasury said.

“Whether in dollars, rials, or crypto, Treasury will hunt down and dismantle the illicit financial networks that keep the regime afloat,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.

Aban Tether processed funds for sanctioned exchanges

OFAC separately accused Iran-based Aban Tether of processing millions of dollars in transactions involving entities already under U.S. sanctions.

Those entities included Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin and Ramzinex. The four Iranian exchanges were sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in June after officials accused them of helping restricted entities access digital asset markets.

Chainalysis estimated that Nobitex accounts for roughly half of Iran’s cryptocurrency trading activity. The exchange has denied having a direct relationship or contractual arrangement with the IRGC, Iran’s central bank or other government bodies.

Shelbit has also rejected claims that it knowingly participated in money laundering, terrorism financing or sanctions evasion. Its former management said the company stopped accepting new business in December 2025 and completed its customer wind-down in January.

The sanctions represent administrative designations rather than criminal convictions. However, they block property and interests in property belonging to designated parties when those assets enter U.S. jurisdiction.

US widens Iran crypto crackdown

The latest action expands a U.S. campaign targeting exchanges, wallet addresses and companies accused of helping Iran bypass restrictions during its military conflict with Washington.

In July, U.S. authorities froze $131 million in Iran-linked crypto held in wallets connected to the country’s central bank. That followed an April action in which Tether froze approximately $344 million in USDT across two Tron addresses linked by authorities to Iranian networks.

Bessent previously said the United States had seized or frozen nearly $1 billion in cryptocurrency connected to Iranian exchanges and wallets since the conflict began.

The use of centralized stablecoins gives authorities an enforcement tool that does not exist with assets such as Bitcoin. Issuers can block transfers from designated addresses, while transactions involving decentralized assets generally require control of the private keys.

What the sanctions mean for crypto firms

U.S. persons and companies are generally prohibited from providing funds, services or other economic benefits to the sanctioned exchanges and individuals. Entities owned at least 50% by one or more blocked parties are also covered, even when they are not named separately.

Foreign exchanges, stablecoin issuers and payment providers may also face secondary sanctions exposure if they knowingly process certain transactions involving the designated parties.

OFAC published several Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron and Solana addresses as part of the action. Crypto companies will need to add those identifiers and the sanctioned entities to their transaction-screening systems as Washington continues tracing Iran-linked digital asset flows.

Until now, that meant finding a lab that conducts the test and waiting days for the results. Soon, you”ll be able to do it yourself at home. LymeAlert is the first at-home test for ticks that can detect whether they carry the bacterium Borrelia berdorferi that causes Lyme. To test your tick, you place it in the kit’s container, drop in the included solution, put on the lid, crush the tick by twisting the top and grinding it up, and insert a test strip. Within 30 minutes, the strip tells you whether it detected any Lyme-causing bacteria in your tick. The kit is available for $49.99 to pre-order on the company’s website and will ship at the end of August.

Cointelegraph is committed to providing independent, high-quality journalism across the crypto, blockchain, AI, and fintech industries.

All news, reviews, and analyses are produced with full journalistic independence and integrity. For more details on our standards and processes, please read our Editorial Policy.

Will the solar eclipse be visible from the U.K. and Ireland?

HTX has been hit with sanctions from the European Union and the United Kingdom’s Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office.

In the wake of these measures, TRM Labs highlighted that HTX had started rapidly rotating through addresses on-chain, making it harder to identify its holdings.

This problem was compounded by HTX choosing to change its proof-of-reserves, obscuring the location of its reserves in a new “ThirdParty” category that’s supposed to describe funds held at third-party custodians.

HTX claims that users can still verify the funds by reaching out to the custodians in question, but HTX has failed to respond to our requests for the identity of that custodian.

Read more: HTX moved $1.3 billion from reserves to undisclosed ‘ThirdParty’

Before these transitions, HTX published a proof-of-reserves that contained a variety of addresses.

Protos has attempted to track the stETH in one of those addresses to its final destination and believes that this path may revealing something about how HTX has been functioning.

Let’s start with the May 1 proof of reserves, which noted there were 71,853.22 stETH, at today’s price worth about $135 million, in the address 0x18709e89bd403f470088abdacebe86cc60dda12e.

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On May 30, shortly before HTX was due to generate its June proof-of-reserves where funds were moved to “ThirdParty,” these funds were moved to 0x7C103bbAE0DA51AE929dE97A98633668ddE80d04.

Moments later, they were transferred to 0x8fCA4adE3a517133fF23ca55CdAea29C78C990b8, an address labeled on Etherscan as Poloniex 7.

Shortly after, they were transferred again to 0x29065a4C1f2F20d1E263930088890d6F49Fe715a, an address that Etherscan labels as Poloniex 10.

Finally, moments later, they were transferred to 0x176F3DAb24a159341c0509bB36B833E7fdd0a132, an address labeled on Etherscan as Poloniex 9.

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This address, 0x176F3DAb24a159341c0509bB36B833E7fdd0a132, used to be labeled as “Justin Sun 4” on Etherscan before being listed as a Poloniex address.

This pattern of transactions shows a large quantity of funds moving from HTX to a Poloniex address where they have been commingled with the Poloniex reserves.

Read more: Poloniex and the $1.3B bitcoin question

The wrapped BTC wrinkle

This isn’t the first time that HTX has relied heavily on Poloniex to hold certain assets.

Often, more than half the BTC held at HTX has been in a tokenized form, specifically a tokenized form that seemed to be held by Poloniex.

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This often represented hundreds of millions of dollars worth of value.

Poloniex was unwilling to disclose the addresses where it presumably (hopefully) holds that BTC to Protos.

Got a tip? Send us an email securely via Protos Leaks. For more informed news and investigations, follow us on X, Bluesky, and Google News, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

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