Lead
Just 12 hours before the United States and Israel began attacking Iran in late February, Firouz, a crypto user in Tehran, decided to act. "I was feeling all week the war would start soon," he said. Trusting his instincts, he moved all his crypto savings out of Nobitex – Iran's largest digital asset platform – to his personal digital wallet. "My main thinking was that I could potentially be forfeiting true ownership of any money left in a state-linked or state-monitored Iranian crypto service in the event of war, whether through an action taken by state authorities or as a consequence of cyberattacks," he said.
His move reflects a broader trend: Iran's crypto ecosystem was valued at more than $7.78bn last year, growing at a faster pace compared with 2024, according to crypto transaction monitoring firm Chainalysis. The war has accelerated Iran's turn to digital assets, even as the US tries to tighten its sanctions regime.
Coverage Comparison
The story has been covered by Al Jazeera, which published two separate analyses. The first focuses on Iranians using crypto to offset inflation and sanctions, highlighting the cat-and-mouse race with Washington. The second takes a broader analytical view, arguing that the US-Israel war on Iran is accelerating the erosion of dollar dominance and expanding the use of alternative financial architectures.
Both pieces draw on the same underlying data from Chainalysis but differ in emphasis. The first grounds the trend in individual experiences, like Firouz's, and describes the day-to-day impact of sanctions on Iranian citizens. The second places Iran's crypto adoption within a global shift away from dollar-based trade, linking it to de-dollarisation and the rise of the renminbi.
Key Claims
Iran's crypto ecosystem was valued at over $7.78bn last year, according to Chainalysis, a growth that data suggests is not only driven by citizens seeking to protect their savings from rampant inflation and a weakening currency. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) accounted for about 50 percent of on-chain activity in the fourth quarter, mirroring its dominance in the country's economy. Harder to trace and easier to transfer than traditional bank payments, crypto offers Iran a way to sell oil, buy weapons and commodities, circumventing sanctions. It has also been a method of payment for imports of goods.
The US has responded by sanctioning a network of Iran-linked crypto wallets, freezing $344m in digital assets. The Central Bank of Iran bought over $500m in USDT, the US dollar-backed stablecoin, last year, further embedding crypto in the country's financial system. Iranian authorities also imposed strict internet restrictions since the start of the war, which has not halted the growth of crypto activity.
A report by Chainalysis shows that cryptocurrency flows to sanctioned entities went up remarkably in 2025, with their value rising 694 percent to a record $154bn – up from $59bn in 2024. In the final quarter of the year, the IRGC alone accounted for 50 percent of value received – a total of $3bn.
The US relies on the dominance of its currency in global trade to leverage the sanctions it imposes. Sanctioned states are unable to carry out sanctioned trade because buyers and sellers process payments in dollars. The spread of cryptocurrency as an alternative payment method has provided a way to circumvent this problem. Iran converts cryptocurrency holdings into renminbi, which is then used to buy Russian goods or conduct trade across Asian markets – embedding itself further into an alternative financial architecture that strengthens the renminbi.
Beyond crypto, Iran also uses hawala networks and barter arrangements to evade sanctions. These informal transfer networks and alternative trading methods have long been part of the grey economy, but the war may now expand the pool of economic actors willing to use such methods to deal with the Iranian state and entities.