Iran’s currency has hit another low point.
The rial traded at roughly 2.02 million per dollar on the open market earlier this week, down from 1.53 million in Q1 this year. The drop came as the Trump administration rolled out Operation Economic Outcast, a sanctions package first announced on August 19. It added more than 60 entities to the Treasury’s blacklist and, for the first time, named digital assets as a sanctionable sector alongside technology, gold, aviation and shipping.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the goal is to force Iran’s state-run Bank Melli to go “shuttered and dark” or lose dollar access entirely. He also warned that secondary sanctions on Iran’s trading partners could follow within weeks. The IMF now projects Iran’s annual inflation will average 68.9% in 2026, with the economy contracting 5.4%. Rice and beef prices have already risen sharply since the pressure intensified.
Iran’s Crypto Workaround Has Been Years in the Making
Tehran legalized bitcoin mining in 2019. Licensed operators get industrial electricity at roughly $0.004 per kilowatt-hour, but in exchange they must sell their mined coins to the central bank. State-affiliated farms linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now control an estimated 65% of that mining capacity. Iran-based miners have accounted for somewhere between 3% and 7% of global bitcoin hashrate since 2019, producing coins worth an estimated $1.35 billion to $3.15 billion at various points.
Alongside mining, Iran’s broader crypto sector reached $7.78 billion in value last year. Chainalysis estimates IRGC-linked wallet addresses alone received more than $3 billion in Q4 2025. Elliptic separately found Iran’s central bank had built up at least $507 million in USDT to help prop up the rial.
Washington Has Been Pressing for Months
This isn’t the first U.S. move against Iran’s crypto network. In June, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin and Ramzinex. Nobitex alone processed more than half of Iran’s digital-asset inflows and helped the central bank move hundreds of millions of dollars in stablecoins while also allowing regime insiders to reach international exchanges.
Earlier in April, Treasury seized nearly $500 million in Iran-linked crypto assets after a cyberattack drained more than $90 million from Nobitex. That forced the central bank to reroute its stablecoin flows across multiple blockchains to keep things running. But TRM Labs found Iran’s total crypto flows cooled to $3.7 billion in 2025, as the Nobitex hack, Tether freezes and mounting geopolitical risk eroded trust in the system.
Can Iran Survive the Pressure?
Bessent has floated secondary sanctions on countries that keep trading with Tehran. That could squeeze the same intermediaries Iran’s crypto network relies on to convert stablecoins into usable cash. Iran’s mining operations are also exposed on a more basic level: the power grid is already strained, and further military escalation or blackout-driven rationing could do more to shut down IRGC-linked mining farms than any sanctions list.
The rial’s slide and the new sanctions package are just the latest chapter in a fight that has gone on for years. Every crackdown on Iran’s crypto lifeline so far has been met with a new workaround. It’s too early to say whether this round will be different.
