Hamas’ military wing advises donors to use Bybit, OKX over Binance

The military wing of Hamas has explicitly told its supporters to stop using Binance when sending cryptocurrency donations, directing them instead toward alternatives including Bybit, OKX, Trust Wallet, RedotPay, and Kast. The Al-Qassam Brigades still permit Binance for purchasing crypto assets, but the exchange is now considered too risky as a conduit for moving funds to the designated terrorist organization.

FBI seizures and the Tron trail

The shift in platform preferences comes as US authorities have significantly escalated their pursuit of Hamas-linked crypto wallets. The FBI seized approximately $560,000 in cryptocurrency connected to the group’s fundraising operations, according to a recent investigation covering the period from March 2025 onward.

The funds moved primarily through the Tron blockchain, denominated in USDT. Hamas operatives employed rotating wallet addresses in an attempt to minimize their digital footprint, using a fresh address for each donation cycle so no single wallet accumulates enough history to attract attention.

The FBI identified a shared “gas” wallet, essentially a single address used to pay transaction fees for multiple donation-related wallets. That pattern gave investigators a thread to pull, linking otherwise disconnected wallets into a coherent fundraising network. One particularly active wallet received roughly 1.57 million USDT between late October 2024 and March 2025.

From Bitcoin to stablecoins

The Al-Qassam Brigades have been soliciting digital asset donations since at least 2019. The group initially used Bitcoin before pivoting to USDT on Tron, reflecting a broader shift driven by Bitcoin’s transparent ledger, which gave blockchain analytics firms and law enforcement the ability to cluster addresses, identify exchange deposits, and connect wallets to real-world identities.

What this means for exchanges

The fact that Hamas is steering donors away from Binance suggests the exchange’s compliance efforts, which expanded considerably after its $4.3B settlement with US authorities in late 2023, are having a tangible deterrent effect. But the redirection toward Bybit, OKX, and non-custodial tools like Trust Wallet puts pressure on those platforms to demonstrate equivalent vigilance.

Bybit, which suffered a $1.4B hack earlier in 2025, is already navigating heightened scrutiny. Non-custodial wallets like Trust Wallet present a fundamentally different challenge: because they don’t hold user funds or process transactions through centralized infrastructure, they have limited ability to block specific users or freeze assets.

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