Iran Eases Currency Controls, Letting Exporters Settle Trade in Bitcoin and USDT
Iran’s relationship with crypto has moved through several distinct phases under the pressure of sanctions, and the latest one, reported by the Financial Times on September 9, looks less like a crackdown and more like a quiet accommodation.
Earlier in 2026: Wallets Frozen, Pressure Mounting
Washington spent much of the year tightening the screws on Iran’s use of stablecoins to move money around sanctions. In July, the US Treasury added wallets linked to Iran’s central bank to its sanctions list, prompting Tether to freeze roughly $131 million in USDT tied to those addresses. Over a broader three-month stretch, US authorities used Tether’s ability to blacklist addresses to freeze an estimated $475 million in USDT connected to Iranian entities altogether — one of the largest sustained pressure campaigns against a single country’s use of stablecoins to date.
Recent Months: A Quiet Loosening at Home
Even as US enforcement escalated, Iran’s own central bank was reportedly moving in a different direction domestically. According to the Financial Times report, the central bank has eased foreign-currency controls in recent months, allowing exporters to bring overseas earnings home and settle cross-border transactions through Iranian cryptocurrency exchanges — using both USDT and Bitcoin — rather than funneling everything through the country’s official foreign-exchange system at fixed rates. Businesses can reportedly now use those overseas earnings to fund imports directly, sidestepping the bureaucratic and financially unfavorable official channel entirely.
Alireza Bozorgmehri, a member of the Iran Digital Transformation Association, told the Financial Times that the central bank has also relaxed its scrutiny of domestic crypto exchanges as part of the same shift. Iranian authorities reportedly estimate that businesses have accumulated more than $100 billion in undeclared earnings held both domestically and abroad — a pool of capital the government appears increasingly motivated to draw back into the formal economy by whatever channel works, crypto included.
September 9: The Contradiction in Plain View
The result is a policy environment that looks contradictory on its face but makes a certain sense under sustained sanctions pressure: the same government whose central bank wallets get frozen by Washington via Tether is simultaneously loosening the rules for its own exporters to use the very same stablecoin domestically. For a country largely cut off from traditional dollar-clearing banking channels, crypto rails represent one of the few remaining ways to settle international trade at all — even knowing that the US and its allies can and do freeze those same rails when they can trace the destination back to sanctioned entities.
Whether this becomes a durable feature of Iran’s economic policy or a temporary release valve during a period of acute financial pressure isn’t yet clear. What is clear is that crypto’s role in Iran’s economy is no longer confined to individuals trying to preserve savings against currency devaluation — it now sits at the center of how the state itself is trying to keep trade moving under sanctions it cannot lift through negotiation.
This article discusses cryptocurrency’s use in sanctions-evasion contexts for informational purposes only and does not endorse or provide guidance on evading sanctions, which is illegal in most jurisdictions. Not financial advice. For background on stablecoins and cross-border payments, see Coin680’s Bitcoin Academy.