The rial’s fall is hard to ignore. It traded near 2.02 million per dollar on the open market this week, down from roughly 1.53 million in the first quarter. That move came as Washington rolled out a new sanctions package called Operation Economic Outcast, first announced on August 19. The package added more than 60 entities to the Treasury blacklist and, for the first time, named digital assets as a sanctionable sector alongside technology, gold, aviation, and shipping.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the goal is to cut off dollar access for Bank Melli, Iran’s state-run bank, and warned that secondary sanctions on trading partners could follow within weeks. The IMF expects Iranian inflation to average 68.9% in 2026 and the economy to contract by 5.4%. Rice and beef prices have already moved sharply higher.
The Bitcoin mining problem for Washington
Iran legalized bitcoin mining in 2019. Licensed operators can use industrial electricity priced at roughly $0.004 per kilowatt-hour, but they have to sell mined coins to the central bank. Over time, state-linked mining farms connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have come to control an estimated 65% of that capacity. Iran-based miners have accounted for somewhere between 3% and 7% of global bitcoin hashrate since then, producing coins worth an estimated $1.35 billion to $3.15 billion at different points.
The broader crypto system in Iran was worth about $7.78 billion last year. Chainalysis estimates IRGC-linked wallet addresses received more than $3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025. Separately, Elliptic found Iran’s central bank had built up at least $507 million in USDT, apparently to support the rial.
Washington has already been chipping away
The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned four Iranian exchanges in June: Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin, and Ramzinex. Nobitex alone handled more than half of Iran’s digital-asset inflows and helped the central bank move hundreds of millions of dollars in stablecoins. That came after a roughly $500 million seizure of Iran-linked crypto assets in April, following a cyberattack that drained more than $90 million from Nobitex in mid-2025. The central bank had to reroute stablecoin flows across multiple blockchains to keep things running.
TRM Labs found that Iran’s total crypto flows cooled to $3.7 billion in 2025. The Nobitex hack, Tether freezes, and rising geopolitical risk all played a part in that decline.
What happens next is unclear
Bessent has floated secondary sanctions on countries that keep trading with Tehran. That would squeeze the intermediaries Iran relies on to turn stablecoins into usable cash. But there is also a more basic problem: Iran’s power grid is already strained. Military escalation or blackout-driven rationing could shut down IRGC-linked mining farms faster than any sanctions list.
The rial’s slide and the new sanctions may be the latest chapter in a long-running fight. So far, every crackdown on Iran’s crypto network has been met with some new workaround. There is no clear sign that pattern is about to break.
