Iran’s sanctions-busting crypto ambitions grow on toll payments
Synopsis
Iran proposes digital currency for Strait of Hormuz passage tolls. This move highlights a significant sanctions-evasion network. While legitimate channels find this plan unworkable, Iran’s crypto ecosystem is growing. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps channels billions through digital assets. This reveals a complex infrastructure for moving funds outside Western financial systems. The transparency of blockchain presents challenges for Iran’s plans.
As a fragile US-Iran ceasefire takes shape, Tehran has signaled that payments in digital currency should form part of any toll system for vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which around a fifth of the world’s oil normally flows. The logic is clear: tokens cannot be easily confiscated under sanctions.
Crypto market participants say the plan appears all but unworkable through legitimate channels. Yet the demand has laid bare a sanctions-evasion infrastructure that is larger, and harder for Western enforcers to contain, than any single toll system.
The Financial Times reported this week that Iran would demand payments in Bitcoin, citing a spokesperson for Iran’s oil exporters’ union. previously reported that operatives are seeking tolls in yuan or stablecoins, citing shipping industry participants.
Crypto TrackerTOP COINS (₹) Bitcoin6,642,630 (0.69%)XRP124 (0.22%)Tether93 (-0.21%)Ethereum202,434 (-0.22%)BNB55,563 (-0.44%)TRM Labs, a blockchain analytics company, said Iranian legislation authorizes the use of “digital currencies” routed through domestically licensed entities — part of a framework designed to ensure the state can monitor and direct crypto flows rather than relying on external networks it does not control.
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“Shipping companies are already under fairly enhanced supervision worldwide, given they are in a high-risk industry,” said Jake Ostrovskis, head of over-the-counter trading at Wintermute, one of the largest crypto market makers. “If there is an inclination that it is going to be somewhere sanctioned, no desks would work with them.”
The Hormuz toll proposal, whether it takes hold or fades with the ceasefire, has nonetheless made visible the degree to which cryptocurrency is now woven into the financial architecture of a sanctioned state — and the scale of the state’s ambitions to push further.
Iran’s crypto ecosystem reached $7.8 billion last year, according to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. During the peak of crypto mining, the state mined Bitcoin and sold it to the central bank to pay for imports beyond the reach of dollar-denominated systems, per data firm Elliptic.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps channeled more than $3 billion through digital asset networks last year, Chainalysis found, accounting for more than half of all crypto value received by Iranian entities in the fourth quarter of 2025.
The IRGC’s infrastructure for moving crypto has deepened rapidly. By early 2025, wallets linked to the Houthis were identified carrying nearly $1 billion in activity in under a year, according to Chainalysis. In January, the US Treasury sanctioned two UK-registered exchanges for facilitating roughly $1 billion in IRGC-linked stablecoin activity, according to TRM Labs — the first such designation tied to the IRGC.
Sanctions-evasion payments have historically relied on layers of intermediaries to create distance between the payer and the sanctioned entity. A formal toll collected by an IRGC-linked intermediary would offer no such cover.
The difficulty, crypto traders say, falls mainly on mainstream shipping companies — many of them Western-listed and subject to stringent compliance regimes — that would need to acquire cryptocurrency and transmit it to a sanctioned counterparty for the first time. Operators already accustomed to working in sanctions grey zones may face fewer obstacles, but even they would be making payments into a system with no plausible deniability.
For now, the ceasefire is largely holding ahead of talks in Pakistan this weekend, but the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively shut.
Institutional crypto desks conduct due diligence on corporate clients, including questions about the intended use of funds. The alternative — offshore, unregulated brokers willing to exchange cash for Bitcoin — exists, but presents its own risks.
The transparency of the blockchain itself compounds the problem. “Whether they do stablecoins or Bitcoin, it is all on public ledgers,” said Bohan Jiang, a senior derivatives trader at FalconX, a digital asset brokerage. “Eventually people will be able to see this transfer.” Even off-ramping the crypto into usable currency requires a counterparty willing to accept digital tokens, Jiang said.
Rich Rosenblum, co-founder of crypto trading and investment firm GSR and former head of crude oil trading at Goldman Sachs, said the mechanics would differ sharply depending on who is making the voyage. Companies already part of the so-called shadow fleet may hold Bitcoin as part of their workflow. For mainstream operators, the entry point would be a crypto exchange or OTC dealer — and most regulated exchanges would flag or block a transaction headed for an Iranian counterparty.
A standard supertanker carrying roughly 2 million barrels of crude could face a toll of about $2 million — an amount that crypto traders say can be easily executed through an exchange or over-the-counter dealer.
“But most exchanges would not want a user sending funds to Iran,” Rosenblum said. “They could buy it, take it off exchange and then send it from their own wallet.”
In other words, the infrastructure to make the payment exists — but using it would require mainstream shipping companies to step outside the compliance perimeter that exchanges are designed to enforce.
The picture sits awkwardly alongside Washington’s embrace of digital finance. The US signed its first comprehensive stablecoin legislation into law last year, seeking to extend the dollar’s reach into a new generation of payment rails. But the same infrastructure it seeks to legitimize is already embedded in the sanctions-evasion operations of America’s principal adversaries.
Double edge
The irony may cut both ways. Stablecoins — the instrument most useful to the IRGC for the dollar stability and speed they offer — may also be its most vulnerable. Transactions occur on public ledgers that can be monitored and, in some cases, frozen by token issuers.
“With stablecoins, you start to better understand how these networks operate — you can graph the interconnectivity of IRGC proxy operators,” said Andrew Fierman, head of national security intelligence at Chainalysis. “It gives more opportunity for law enforcement agencies to freeze these funds.”
The challenge is that the IRGC obtains stablecoins on the secondary market — through exchange accounts and illicit networks — rather than directly from issuers, making detection harder and enforcement reactive. “This activity isn’t primary market trading,” Fierman said. “The issuers aren’t issuing these assets directly to these parties. They are obtaining them through newer accounts at exchanges or illicit networks.”
If the US ends up splitting toll revenues with Iran for Hormuz passage — a move President Donald Trump said he was considering — that could potentially make the payment process less complicated. But the Office of Foreign Assets Control and the Department of Energy would likely have to work out a payment setup for shippers, Rosenblum said.
“Iran has always looked for ways to evade sanctions and move outside the US financial system, and that’s only become more critical in the wake of conflict,” said Ari Redbord, global head of policy and government affairs at TRM Labs. “This fits a broader pattern of engagement with other sanctioned or aligned actors, including Russia and China, looking for alternative payment rails outside the Western financial system.”
