Settlement Agreement between the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control and Bittrex, Inc.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) today announced a settlement with Bittrex, Inc., a private company based in Bellevue, Washington that provides an online virtual currency exchange and hosted wallet services. Bittrex agreed to remit $24,280,829.20 to settle its potential civil liability for apparent violations of sanctions against Cuba, Ukraine-related, Iran, Sudan, and Syria. As a result of deficiencies related to Bittrex’s sanctions compliance procedures, Bittrex failed to prevent persons apparently located in the sanctioned jurisdictions from using its platform to engage in over $263,000,000 worth of virtual currency-related transactions. Based on internet protocol (“IP”) address information and physical address information collected about each customer at onboarding, Bittrex had reason to know that these users were located in jurisdictions subject to sanctions. At the time of the transactions, however, Bittrex was not screening this customer information for terms associated with sanctioned jurisdictions. For more information, please visit the following web notice.