Iran’s Crypto Economy Explodes Past $7.78B Amidst Protests, War, and Sanctions

Iran’s cryptocurrency ecosystem reached a total activity of more than $7.78 billion in 2025, expanding at a faster pace for most of the year compared to 2024, according to a new report by blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.

The growth occurred against a backdrop of intensifying political, economic, and security pressures on the country, including sanctions, high inflation, domestic unrest, and escalating regional conflict.

Wars, Protests, and a Plunging Currency

In its latest report this week, Chainalysis stated that Iran’s crypto activity has increasingly followed major political and geopolitical events. The on-chain transaction volumes spiked during periods of heightened instability. The report identified several such episodes.

This includes the January 2024 Kerman bombings that killed nearly 100 people at a memorial for former IRGC-Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s missile strikes against Israel in October 2024 following the assassinations of Hamas leader Isma’il Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah in Beirut, and a smaller but still notable surge during the 12-day conflict in June 2025, when Iran’s long-running shadow war with Israel escalated sharply.

That June conflict happened during the same time as joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile infrastructure, cyberattacks on Nobitex, Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, and Bank Sepah, the country’s oldest bank and an institution heavily used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as well as the hacking of Iranian state television broadcasts.

Chainalysis found that overall crypto activity in Iran not only grew year over year, but did so at a faster rate than in the previous year. This evidenced crypto’s role as both a financial alternative and a response to systemic economic stress, including inflation estimated at 40-50% and a rial that has depreciated by roughly 90% since 2018.

IRGC’s Crypto Footprint

A major finding of the report was the IRGC’s growing dominance within Iran’s crypto economy. Addresses associated with IRGC-linked facilitation networks accounted for more than 50% of the total value received across the Iranian crypto ecosystem in the fourth quarter of 2025. The volume of funds received by IRGC-associated addresses was more than $2 billion in 2024 and rose to more than $3 billion in 2025.

Chainalysis, however, admitted that these figures represent a lower-bound estimate based only on wallets publicly identified through sanctions designations by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing.

The firm said the true scale is likely larger, considering the potential use of shell companies, undisclosed facilitators, and unidentified wallets tied to IRGC operations, which span illicit oil sales, sanctions evasion, money laundering, and support for regional proxy groups. The report also documented a change in behavior among ordinary Iranians during recent mass protests, particularly between late December 2025 and early January 2026, when an internet blackout was imposed.

During this period, Chainalysis found significant increases in average daily transaction values and transfers to personal wallets, in addition to a pronounced surge in withdrawals from Iranian exchanges to personal Bitcoin wallets. According to the report, this trend indicates that many Iranians turned to Bitcoin as a means of self-custody and capital preservation amid currency collapse and political uncertainty.

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