- The Central Bank of Iran now lets exporters keep foreign earnings in crypto rather than surrender them at official rates.
- Tether holds dollar value against a sinking rial while Bitcoin carries the larger settlements.
- Traders can pay foreign suppliers directly in crypto, forming a barter loop outside SWIFT.
- US freezes of central-bank-linked stablecoin wallets expose the limits of the workaround.
The Central Bank of Iran has reversed years of hard capital controls and now points exporters toward crypto to settle their cross-border trade, according to reporting by the Financial Times. The regulator has dropped the requirement that exporters surrender hard currency to the state at official rates, and it is steering them toward Tether and Bitcoin instead. For sanctioned Iranian firms, that opens a payment route the dollar system struggles to police.
How NIMA left $100 billion in earnings stuck abroad
On the open market the rial now trades somewhere between 1.8 million and 2 million to the dollar, a level that measures how little faith Iranians place in their own money. The open-market rate is simply the price people pay when they buy dollars on the street, and it sits far below the rates the state prints in its official channels. That gap is the whole problem.
Under the old system exporters had to route their foreign revenue through NIMA, Iran’s integrated forex system, and sell it at state-set rates that ran well under the real market price. Selling a dollar earned abroad for a fraction of its street value amounts to a tax by another name, so exporters stopped bringing the money home. Estimates put the earnings parked offshore at around $100 billion.
Iran was never short of the plumbing to make crypto work at scale. On-chain trackers logged roughly $10 billion moving through Iranian networks and local exchanges during 2025, and Elliptic once put the country at roughly 4.5% of global Bitcoin mining, a 2021 estimate that still gets cited because Iran keeps running rigs on heavily subsidized state power.
Two routes crypto takes from an offshore wallet back into Iran
The mechanism is straightforward once the state stops standing in the way. An overseas buyer pays an Iranian exporter in USDT or Bitcoin, straight into a wallet held offshore. From that wallet the money follows one of two paths.
Route A: Direct settlement
The exporter spends the crypto on imported raw materials and goods, paying a foreign supplier or another domestic company directly. The funds never pass through NIMA or the SWIFT banking network.
Route B: Local repatriation
The exporter routes the crypto through a domestic Iranian exchange to bring value back into the country, while the central bank avoids asking how or where the funds moved.
Industry figures quoted by the FT say crypto payments for exports have become normal practice rather than the exception. The central bank has loosened its oversight of local exchanges rather than tightened it, which flips the stance it took at the start of the year when it blocked rial gateways to retail crypto platforms.
Tether can freeze a wallet, and Washington already has
None of this makes the channel safe. Tether runs on a centralized smart contract, and the company behind it complies with US enforcement requests, which means an Iranian wallet can be frozen from the outside without any cooperation from Tehran.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has pushed Washington toward tighter economic isolation of Iran, and the results already show up on-chain. After OFAC added four Central Bank of Iran wallets to its sanctions list, Tether froze about $131 million in USDT sitting in them, according to Chainalysis. That freeze is part of a wider campaign that has locked up or seized close to $1 billion in Iranian-linked crypto.
The timing works against Tehran. On August 24 the Treasury formally designated Iran’s digital-asset sector as sanctionable under Executive Order 13902, which lets OFAC target a whole slice of the economy instead of named entities, and on September 8 it hit dozens more Iranian commercial targets. Iran is leaning on crypto at the exact moment Washington is assembling the tools to choke it.
Scale is the other constraint. A shadow flow of around $10 billion is thin cover for a national trade account that runs into the tens of billions, so the workaround eases pressure without closing the gap. Iran still faces persistent shortages of industrial inputs and staple imports.
| Risk | How it bites | Consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Centralized stablecoin | Tether can freeze wallets on a US request | $131M in CBI-linked USDT already frozen |
| Thin liquidity | ~$10B flow against multi-billion trade needs | shortages of industrial and staple goods |
| Secondary sanctions | US targets any exchange touching Iranian flows | platforms such as CoinEx purge Iranian users |
Why the next fight is over Tether’s freeze button
The immediate pressure point sits at the exchanges and OTC brokers that touch Iranian flows. Washington’s secondary sanctions reach any foreign platform that services sanctioned actors, which is why venues such as CoinEx have moved to strip Iranian accounts rather than risk their own access to Western markets.
Tether itself is the harder problem. The same compliance that lets Iranian merchants hold dollar value also lets the issuer freeze it, and every freeze nudges users toward Bitcoin or decentralized stablecoins that are harder to seize and harder to spend. Whether other sanctioned economies read Iran’s move as a template will depend less on the technology than on how much of that $100 billion in offshore earnings actually finds its way back home.