It is no surprise that Iran is now accepting cryptocurrency payments from cargo ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Blockchain crime experts say the move fits perfectly with Tehran’s existing sanctions surrounding trade networks.
Iran’s crypto charges have now been confirmed via recent comments from a spokesman for Iran’s Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union, who said that bitcoin is being accepted as a payment method. An earlier report suggested that stablecoins were accepted to allow a select few oil tankers to pass unscathed. Both reports stated that the fee was $1 per barrel of oil, where the largest tankers transported up to two million barrels.
The formalization of a system of shipping payments made using bitcoin and USD-linked stablecoins appears to be a bold move. But in reality, the Iranian regime, and more specifically the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has increasingly used cryptocurrency over the past few years to facilitate cross-border commercial trade, particularly with Iranian oil sales, according to data from blockchain analytics specialist Chainalysis.
“It’s not at all surprising that this type of trade would also take place via cryptocurrency,” said Andrew Fierman, head of national security intelligence at Chainalysis, referring to the toll paid by ships allowed to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow sea channel through which about a fifth of the world’s oil and liquid natural gas normally pass.
A snapshot of sanctioned activity from the past year and a half shows a growing and complex network using crypto wallets. Back in December 2024, a US-sanctioned, IRGC-affiliated financier linked to the Iran-backed Houthi regime facilitated Iranian oil sales to Yemen involving cryptocurrency addresses. This came to over $178 million in transfers in a single year.
Then, in April 2025, a wider network of Houthi financiers bought weapons and raw materials from Russia. Their cryptocurrency addresses were included in a sanctions designation accounting for nearly a billion dollars in activity — again over the course of the year.
Interestingly, the Houthis, an Iran-backed armed group that controls large parts of northern Yemen, have now raised the prospect of imposing another choke point on world oil and gas shipping at the Bab-al-Mandeb Canal, which links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden.
In any case, the image is one of IRGC-affiliated networks using crypto on a commercial scale to facilitate cross-border trade, according to Fierman of Chianalysis. It’s a system that’s much more complex and established than just a handful of wallets being used forever, he said.
“They have a network of cryptocurrency wallets that the regime uses to facilitate this cross-border activity. Accepting these payments in crypto would make it easier than potentially using the traditional banking system, and there’s enough liquidity out there that they don’t even really need to use cryptocurrency exchanges either,” Fierman said in an interview.
The way the IRGC broadly adopts cryptocurrency, specifically stablecoins, as a payment mechanism for cross-border trade is really the reverse of the situation with North Korea, Fierman pointed out, where the main goal is to steal billions of dollars in crypto and launder it.
The Iranian regime has been heavily sanctioned since 1979, including individual sanctions against almost all banks, so its inability to access US dollar-linked assets makes it a challenge for them to trade internationally.
“The reality is that most counterparties don’t want to trade in Rials or Tomans, especially given the hyperinflation that regularly happens in the country as well. So this ability to have a US dollar-linked asset creates a mechanism that allows them to trade globally with anyone willing to trade with them in an alternative mechanism that doesn’t rely on the traditional banking system,” Fierman said.
In Iran, the official currency is the Rial (IRR), but people universally use Tomans on a daily basis in, for example, shops; one Toman equals 10 Rials.
Tom Keatinge, founding director of the Center for Finance and Security (CFS) at UK defense think tank RUSI, agreed that USD-backed stablecoins have become an increasingly important payment mechanism for the Iranian regime, which avoids sanctions and Western banking controls.
“While the use of stablecoins may open users up to Western regulatory intervention, evidence suggests this risk is low,” Keatinge said in an email.
Lee Reiners, a lecturing fellow at Duke University’s Financial Economics Center, suggested a new way for the Iranian regime to advance its sanctions-defying stablecoin goals.
“If Iran was thinking strategically, maybe it would take a cue from its neighbors across the strait in the UAE and demand payment in USD1,” Reiners said, referring to the stablecoin launched by Trump family affiliate World Liberty Financial in March 2025. “Then the president of the United States would have a financial incentive to allow them to lift sanctions, which they want.”
