Iran’s central bank quietly built up a large stash of Tether’s USDT last year as the rial struggled and trade with the outside world grew harder. The move turned parts of the crypto ledger into a public trail of a policy that would normally be private.
Central Bank’s Crypto Moves
New Elliptic research: We have identified wallets used by Iran’s Central Bank to acquire at least $507 million worth of cryptoassets.
Elliptic’s tracing shows an early flow of USDT into Nobitex, Iran’s biggest crypto exchange, where the coins could be swapped into rials and fed into the market. After a breach and growing scrutiny in mid-2025, other paths were used, including cross-chain bridges and decentralized exchanges, to move and convert funds.
This episode matters for two reasons. First, it shows how a state institution can use stablecoins to gain access to dollar value when normal banking routes are closed.
Second, it highlights a weakness: if a private issuer can freeze balances, those reserves are not the same as cash held in hard foreign accounts.
Trade, Sanctions, And A New ToolReports note the purchases likely served a twin goal — to smooth domestic exchange rates and to help settle trade with partners who avoid direct dollar banking.
The method is blunt. It gives a way to move value, but it also creates new points of control and exposure that can be tracked on public ledgers.
Analysts will be watching how regulators and stablecoin issuers respond. They will also track whether other countries under pressure turn to similar mixes of centralized and decentralized tools.
The public tracing of these flows makes it harder to hide big moves, even when actors try to obscure them across chains and exchanges.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView
