Iran eases currency rules to route trade through crypto as US sanctions tighten

Iran’s central bank has reportedly loosened foreign currency controls to push businesses to repatriate overseas earnings, including by settling cross-border transactions in cryptocurrency. For high-risk PSPs, the useful detail is not the politics; it’s that the country is explicitly steering flows toward USDT and BTC while the US keeps freezing and sanctioning related infrastructure.

1. The Financial Times reported on Wednesday that exporters can use overseas earnings to finance imports directly, without first selling foreign currency through the government’s exchange platform at official rates. In other words, the state is making it easier to keep value moving inside the trade loop rather than forcing conversion through the formal FX channel.
2. The same report said Iranian cryptocurrency exchanges can be used to settle cross-border transactions with Tether’s USDt (USDT) and Bitcoin (BTC). For PSPs and compliance teams, that means the rail being described is not a vague “crypto workaround” but a specific settlement path involving stablecoins and BTC.
3. The Central Bank of Iran did not respond to Cointelegraph’s request for comment. That matters because there is no official clarification in the source beyond the reported policy shift.
4. In June, blockchain analytics company TRM Labs reported more than $3.8 billion in flows between crypto exchange CoinEx and sanctioned Iranian entities over more than seven years. CoinEx denied any commercial relationship with the Iranian government or domestic Iranian exchanges and said it had never provided funding channels to sanctioned parties.
5. In early June, the US Treasury sanctioned four Iranian crypto exchanges as part of its “Economic Fury” campaign. Days before that, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the US had seized about $1 billion in Iranian crypto assets, and on July 14 he said authorities had directed a freeze of more than $130 million in crypto held in wallets linked to Iran’s central bank.

For high-risk providers, the practical takeaway is straightforward: Iran is being described as actively pushing trade settlement toward crypto at the same time US sanctions are targeting exchanges, wallets, and seized assets. That is exactly the sort of corridor where screening, wallet tracing, and counterparty controls stop being box-ticking exercises.