Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said Iran’s Central Bank accumulated at least $507 million in Tether’s USDT as a way to support the rial while operating with constrained access to dollar liquidity. The core claim is that USDT was used as a substitute liquidity buffer, allowing open-market purchases of rials without drawing further on official foreign reserves.
Elliptic traced the activity to a network of wallets and placed the bulk of acquisition in April–May 2025, with accumulation continuing through late 2025. The timeline matters because it frames the strategy as sustained positioning rather than a one-off tactical trade.
🚨 New Elliptic research: We have identified wallets used by Iran's Central Bank to acquire at least $507 million worth of cryptoassets.
The findings suggest that the Iranian regime used these cryptoassets to evade sanctions and support the plummeting value of Iran's currency,… pic.twitter.com/I7NHGO0wtP
— Elliptic (@elliptic) January 21, 2026
How the flows were routed, and why the path changed
Elliptic’s account says the Central Bank of Iran relied on Nobitex as a primary on-ramp, then sold USDT for rials in open-market operations designed to stem depreciation, with the rial described as trading near 1.4 million per U.S. dollar during the cited period. In operational terms, the mechanism reads like a domestic liquidity injection executed via an on-chain dollar proxy.
After a reported security breach at Nobitex on June 18, 2025, the routing reportedly shifted. Funds were moved through cross-chain bridges, with USDT flowing from TRON to Ethereum and then being exchanged into other assets across multiple venues and chains. The takeaway is that the operational playbook became more complex once the original on-ramp was compromised, increasing both execution risk and traceability touchpoints.
The stablecoin trade-off: access versus control
The episode also highlights a constraint that does not exist with physical dollars: issuer intervention. On June 15, 2025, Tether reportedly blacklisted wallets tied to the CBI and froze about $37 million in USDT. That freeze event is the clearest reminder that stablecoins can provide rapid access to dollar-pegged liquidity, but they also embed counterparty control at the issuer level.
From a market-structure and risk standpoint, the case surfaces two realities at once. Exchange security incidents and issuer enforcement actions can materially reduce the reliability of on-chain liquidity as a policy tool, while blockchain transparency makes flows easier to trace and disrupt, limiting the durability of covert routing over time.
Investors and FX desks are likely to watch for additional freezes, bridge exposures, or further exchange security events as leading indicators of whether stablecoin-based interventions remain viable in sanctioned or liquidity-constrained environments. Those operational frictions, not just access to tokens, will determine how scalable this approach is under sustained currency stress.
