Iran’s crypto economy explodes past $7.78 billion amid protests, war and sanctions

From missile attacks to protests, the political convulsions in Iran repeatedly caused crypto spikes.

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

The growth took place against the backdrop of increasing political, economic and security pressure on the country, including sanctions, high inflation, civil unrest and escalating regional conflicts.

Wars, protests and a plummeting currency

In her latest report this week, Chainalysis declared that Iran’s crypto activity has increasingly followed major political and geopolitical events. Transaction volumes in the chain increased during periods of increased instability. The report identified several such episodes.

This includes the Kerman bombings in January 2024 that killed nearly 100 people at a memorial to former IRGC-Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian rocket attacks on 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 wave during the twelve-day conflict in June 2025, when Iran’s long shadow war with Israel escalated sharply.

That June conflict occurred at the same time as joint U.S.-Israeli attacks 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 was not only growing year over year, but also faster than in the previous year. This proves crypto’s role as both a financial alternative and a response to systemic economic stress, including inflation estimated at 40-50% and the rial devalued by around 90% since 2018.

IRGC Crypto Footprint

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

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

The company said the actual size is likely larger given the potential use of shell companies, secret facilitators and unidentified wallets tied to IRGC operations, which include 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, especially 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 increase 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-restraint and capital preservation amid the currency’s collapse and political uncertainty.