The US Treasury just Marie Kondo’d its sanctions list. The Office of Foreign Assets Control removed 76 entries from its Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List on May 28, marking the most significant housekeeping effort the agency has undertaken in years.
The purge targeted exactly the kind of entries you’d expect from a list that rarely gets pruned: deceased individuals, decommissioned vessels, and dissolved illicit networks. An interagency review concluded that none of these entities currently posed any risk to US interests.
Why the sanctions list got so bloated
Annual new SDN designations rose from roughly 880 in 2017 to over 3,000 in 2024. That’s a nearly four-fold increase in just seven years, with very little corresponding effort to remove entries that had outlived their usefulness.
Every single one of those entries creates work for someone. Banks, brokerages, payment processors, and yes, crypto exchanges all have to screen transactions against the SDN List. More entries means more false positives. More false positives means more compliance staff, more delayed transactions, and more cost passed along to customers.
