The European Union has prohibited transactions with HTX, a crypto exchange formerly known as Huobi, after adding it to a group of 14 foreign crypto platforms accused of helping Russia bypass sanctions, Reuters reported on Friday, July 24.
- The measure is narrower than a full designation as it doesn't freeze HTX's assets or automatically shut the exchange worldwide.
- Instead, it bars EU operators from transacting with the listed platform.
- The bloc separately sanctioned four entities linked to A7, a Russia-linked cross-border payments network.
The decision comes as analysts recently flagged that HTX's on-chain footprint doesn't stay still for long.
TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence company, said in a July 21 blog post that HTX had spent the seven weeks following UK sanctions repeatedly replacing its deposit, withdrawal and funding wallets across TRON, Ethereum, BNB Chain and Solana.
- Individual addresses were sometimes retired within hours, meaning a conventional blacklist could become outdated before compliance teams even received it.
A spokesperson for HTX told Decrypt that those changes were "routine, security-driven platform operations common across the industry" and rejected any suggestion that they represented sanctions evasion.
Unlike an address blacklist, however, the EU prohibition applies to the platform as a counterparty. Switching to a fresh wallet, therefore, doesn't make a transaction legally permissible for an EU company, although compliance systems still need to identify that the new address belongs to HTX.
- TRM Labs separately estimated that HTX sent more than $4.9 billion to designated or high-risk Russia-linked entities since 2021, including $838 million to A7 in 2025.
- HTX has argued that Huobi Global S.A. is legally separate from its online exchange, although British sanctions officials explicitly said the restrictions apply to HTX because of its ownership.