Iran’s Central Bank Burned $507M USDT to Stop Currency Bleed
Blockchain forensics confirm Iran’s Central Bank deployed nearly half a billion in Tether to fight hyperinflation, signaling a new era of crypto-based sovereign monetary policy.
The desperate bid to peg a falling knife.
The Central Bank of Iran (CBI) has quietly executed one of the largest sovereign crypto interventions on record, deploying over $507 million in Tether (USDT) to stabilize the collapsing Iranian rial. A forensic investigation by Elliptic confirms the bank utilized a complex web of intermediaries to accumulate the stablecoins, marking a definitive shift: a sanctioned state is now using permissionless crypto rails as a de facto Federal Reserve window.
This isn’t a pilot program. It’s a lifeline. The rial has effectively evaporated, trading at 1.42 million to the dollar on the black market, while inflation breaches 40%. The CBI’s strategy appears twofold: inject dollar-denominated liquidity into the local market without touching the SWIFT network, and settle critical imports that traditional banking channels have blocked.
The CBI is effectively constructing a ‘sanctions-proof’ banking mechanism that replicates the utility of international dollar accounts… using crypto assets to perform open market operations, Elliptic Report
The Nobitex Connection & The Pivot
The on-chain footprint reveals a high-risk operational security failure. Until mid-2025, the bulk of the CBI’s USDT flowed through Nobitex, Iran’s largest local exchange. That channel went dark in June after a pro-Israel group, Gonjeshke Darandeh, compromised the platform in a $90 million hack.
Post-hack, the CBI didn’t stop. It adapted. Liquidity moved from the Tron network (favored for low fees) to Ethereum via cross-chain bridges, a move likely designed to obfuscate the trail from Western regulators. While USDT held its peg at $1.00, the sheer volume of these state-sponsored buys suggests the depth of the liquidity crisis in Tehran is far worse than official metrics admit.
Macro Implications: The “Shadow Reserve” Era
Markets should read this as a signal that the “crypto-as-reserve-asset” thesis has graduated from theory to geopolitical reality. We are witnessing a G20 economy circumventing the global banking system’s choke points at scale. If the CBI can move half a billion dollars in stablecoins to defend a currency, the sanctions playbook is fundamentally broken.
