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 carrie
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.
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 the country still accounts for roughly 4.5% of global Bitcoin mining, according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, running on heavily subsidized state power.
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.
Executives close to the authorities describe crypto-denominated payments as “entirely routine” now. 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.
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. Working with blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, US authorities froze about $131 million in USDT held across four wallets tied to the Central Bank of Iran, part of a wider seizure of roughly $1 billion in Iranian crypto assets.
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.
RiskHow it bitesConsequenceCentralized stablecoinTether can freeze wallets on a US request$131M in CBI-linked USDT already frozenThin liquidity~$10B flow against multi-billion trade needsshortages of industrial and staple goodsSecondary sanctionsUS targets any exchange touching Iranian flowsplatforms such as CoinEx purge Iranian usersThe 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.
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