Tehran uses Bitcoin mining and stablecoins as a parallel financial infrastructure for international trade, with the IRGC playing a central role.
According to Chainalysis, Iran has built a parallel economy worth $7.78 billion based on bitcoin and stablecoins to circumvent international sanctions and operate outside the U.S.-controlled banking system. Recent U.S. and Israeli military strikes have drawn renewed attention to this financial infrastructure, which Tehran has developed alongside its traditional banking system – one severely crippled by sanctions.
Iran legalized Bitcoin mining in 2019, allowing licensed operators to use subsidized electricity in exchange for selling mined bitcoins to the central bank. The Iranian state mines BTC at an estimated cost of approximately $1,300 per coin, which are then transferred at prevailing market prices. Estimates from recent years place Iran’s share of Bitcoin’s global hashrate between 2% and 5%, although much of the activity operates away from public scrutiny. The mechanism is straightforward: a licensed miner produces new bitcoins, transfers them to the central bank, which uses them to pay foreign counterparts for machinery, fuel, or consumer goods – all without going through U.S.-controlled banks.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has progressively deepened its role in this sector. Chainalysis estimates that addresses linked to the IRGC accounted for more than 50% of total Iranian digital asset inflows in the fourth quarter of 2025, with over $3 billion received throughout the entire year. Inflows to IRGC-linked addresses had stood at $2 billion in 2024. Chainalysis notes that these figures reflect only wallets publicly linked to sanctions lists, suggesting the true scale of the phenomenon may be even greater.
Stablecoins play a key role in Tehran’s financial architecture. A separate analysis by Elliptic found that the Iranian central bank accumulated at least $507 million in USDT in 2025, likely to stabilize the rial and finance commercial transactions. The effort proved largely ineffective: data shows that the rial lost more than 96% of its value against the dollar.
