President Donald Trump said the United States will return Iran’s frozen money rather than keep it, warning that holding onto seized funds would destroy global confidence in the dollar. Speaking at the G7 summit in France, Trump responded to a question about unfreezing Iranian assets: “It is not our money. It is their money. And we froze it at a certain point in time.” The remarks come as a recent report showed the U.S. had reached $1 billion in cumulative seizure of Iranian crypto assets as of late May 2026.
What Trump said at the G7
Trump argued that keeping the frozen money would damage the dollar’s standing and its dominance as the world’s reserve asset. He stressed that the U.S. is not financing Iran directly, contrasting the deal with past cash transfers. “Holding seized money would destroy global confidence in the U.S. dollar,” Trump said, framing the decision as a matter of preserving the currency’s credibility rather than a concession to Tehran.
The $1 billion crypto seizure
A separate report published in late May 2026 detailed that U.S. authorities had seized roughly $1 billion in cryptocurrency linked to Iranian entities. The cumulative figure underscores how Washington has increasingly targeted crypto in its sanctions enforcement. While Trump’s remarks at the G7 did not specifically address those seizures, his broader position on frozen assets touches directly on the question of whether the U.S. should keep what it seizes — or return it to preserve trust in the dollar.
Each time the U.S. weaponizes the dollar — through sanctions, asset freezes, or seizures — it strengthens the case for a neutral store of value not controlled by any government. Bitcoin’s core appeal is precisely that it sits outside state control. Trump himself has floated the idea of a strategic Bitcoin reserve to strengthen the country’s position, a notion that sits awkwardly alongside his defense of dollar dominance. The tension between using crypto as a tool of state power and recognizing its anti-sovereign ethos is now playing out in real time.
For now, Trump’s G7 remarks reinforce the narrative that even the world’s largest economy worries about overplaying its hand with frozen assets. That anxiety, whether justified or not, is exactly what keeps Bitcoin advocates arguing for an alternative.
