The U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has ordered U.S. financial institutions to stop processing transfers involving MEXC Global after alleging the exchange facilitated at least $16 billion in illicit cryptocurrency transactions. The alleged activity involved sanctions evasion, cybercrime and entities connected to Russia, Iran and North Korea. The measure, issued under Section 9714 of the Combating Russian Money Laundering Act, takes effect 30 days after publication in the Federal Register and targets MEXC’s access to the U.S. financial system rather than automatically freezing customer assets or halting non-U.S. trading. Treasury alleged that MEXC processed about $1.5 billion linked to Russian sanctions evasion, roughly $1 billion involving more than 40 Iranian exchanges and about $200 million involving the ruble-backed A7A5 stablecoin. It also cited transactions with Garantex, Grinex, Iran’s central bank and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Qods Force. MEXC said operations remained normal and customer assets secure, while launching an independent review of its anti-money-laundering and sanctions controls. OKX had restricted direct transfers from MEXC ahead of the effective date, and its founder and CEO Star Xu warned that affected funds could be frozen and accounts investigated. MEX CEO Vugar Usi said withdrawals had increased but operations remained smooth; MEXC is also working with Elliptic on the risk classification of its addresses and plans to engage with FinCEN. NatGold Digital said on Nov. 8 that it had immediately requested the delisting of its NATG token from MEXC. The company said it was acting before the restriction takes effect because its wholly owned NatGold Integrity Vault LLC is registered with FinCEN as a money-services business. NatGold is negotiating with regulated venues serving global markets, including the United States, and plans to provide token holders with account-registration and wallet-linking instructions once replacement listings are confirmed. In a separate November 6 announcement, FinCEN and the Federal Reserve withdrew a proposed expansion of recordkeeping and Travel Rule requirements covering certain convertible virtual currency transfers and lowering a threshold for transfers beginning or ending outside the United States. The withdrawal removes a proposed rulemaking rather than repealing existing anti-money-laundering, customer-identification or information-sharing obligations.