OFAC SDN List

OFAC SDN List

The OFAC SDN List — Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List — is the primary U.S. sanctions list maintained by the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, naming individuals, entities, and, increasingly, specific cryptocurrency wallet addresses that U.S. persons are prohibited from transacting with.

What it means

Once OFAC adds a wallet address to the SDN list, any U.S. person or entity — and, practically, most global financial institutions seeking to maintain U.S. market access — treats transacting with that address as legally prohibited. The list is updated on an ongoing basis in response to specific enforcement actions, sanctions programs, and national security determinations, and is published freely for anyone to check.

Crypto-specific SDN additions have grown substantially since OFAC first added digital currency addresses in 2018, expanding from individual wallets tied to specific sanctioned persons to, in the Tornado Cash case, entire smart contract addresses representing a protocol rather than a person — a significant expansion of how the list is applied to decentralized infrastructure.

Real-world example

OFAC's SDN list additions have included wallets tied to North Korea's Lazarus Group, Russian ransomware operators, and, since August 2022, the Tornado Cash mixer's smart contract addresses themselves — each addition legally binding for U.S. persons the moment it is published.

Related terms

• Sanctioned Address
• Sanctions Screening
• Terrorism Financing

In FreezeRadar

FreezeRadar syncs the OFAC SDN list on an ongoing basis and checks every scanned address against current designations as the first step of every scan.

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