Tether in Iran is the nearest thing to a dollar account for many savers. For the central bank, it has become a pressure gauge it wants to control.
Iran’s central bank plans to block the rial bank accounts and payment gateways of some cryptocurrency exchanges, the IRGC-affiliated Fars news agency reported on Saturday, according to Iran International. Fars said the targets were exchanges accused of placing artificial orders in the Tether market and distorting the price of the dollar-linked token, and with it Iran’s wider foreign-exchange market.
Fars did not name the exchanges. Without rial accounts and payment gateways, customers of an affected exchange would have no easy way to move local money in or out.
The story of Tether in Iran is a story about a currency people no longer trust. Annual inflation reached 89.8% in September on a year-on-year basis, according to the Statistical Center of Iran, as reported by Iran International, and the rial has fallen to record lows against the dollar.
Compared with that, a token designed to hold one dollar is an obvious place to park savings. USDT, Tether’s stablecoin, trades on domestic exchanges against the toman, the unit Iranians use in daily life, equal to 10 rials. That makes those exchanges the country’s busiest informal window onto the dollar, and the central bank’s latest target.
Tether in Iran: from cap to cut-off
The account blocks would build on limits the central bank imposed in late September, Crypto Briefing reported. Those temporary rules capped purchases at 2,000 USDT (about $2,000, or €1,780) per user per day on participating exchanges and halted trading every night from 21:00 to 09:00 Tehran time (17:30 to 05:30 UTC).
The large domestic exchanges Nobitex and Wallex were covered, and Ramzinex and Bitpin introduced similar limits, according to the same report. The caps applied only to trading Tether against the rial; holding or withdrawing USDT was not banned. They were due to expire around 3-4 Oct.
Blocking bank rails goes further. A daily cap slows the flow of rials into dollar tokens; losing the accounts that receive those rials can stop it.
The exchange rate is not “fully consistent with the economy’s fundamental variables”.
— Central Bank of Iran, in a statement on Friday reported by Iran International
The buyer and the referee
The central bank’s position is complicated by its own record in the same market.
Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic has estimated that the Central Bank of Iran acquired at least $507 million of USDT. After US sanctions designations of wallets linked to the central bank, Tether froze about $344 million of USDT in April, according to TRM Labs, and $131 million in July, according to Chainalysis.
The US Treasury sanctioned Nobitex, Iran’s largest exchange, on 2 Jun 2026, and designated Wallex, Bitpin and Ramzinex at the same time, according to OFAC’s recent-actions notice. So the domestic platforms now face pressure from two directions: Washington and the token’s issuer on one side, Tehran’s central bank on the other.
The result is an odd symmetry. The institution that, on the analysts’ reading, sought dollar tokens for its own purposes is now limiting how many its citizens can buy.
A primer on what a dollar stablecoin is.
The risks
For ordinary users, the risks stack up quickly. If an exchange loses its banking rails, rial balances held there may be hard to withdraw until it finds new ones. Users who move to informal peer-to-peer trading, a common response to crypto and capital controls, face more counterparty and scam risk. And a stablecoin held on a sanctioned platform carries the additional risk that the issuer freezes it.
None of this changes the reason people bought USDT in the first place. With prices rising faster than wages, the demand that sent Iranians to the exchanges is still there. The question for the central bank is whether cutting off the busiest window onto the dollar will calm the rial, or simply move the queue somewhere it can see less of.
Produced by the Crypto Watch Desk newsroom using AI tools. This article is for information only and is not investment advice.