Central Bank of Iran plans to block rial accounts tied to crypto exchanges

The Central Bank of Iran plans to block rial accounts and payment gateways belonging to some crypto exchanges. The reason given is concern over market manipulation.

What the central bank is doing

The planned blocks would hit two things: the rial bank accounts exchanges use to hold customer deposits, and the payment gateways that move money in and out. Without those, users cannot easily fund accounts with local currency.

This builds on earlier restrictions. The central bank, known as the CBI, introduced temporary limits on USDT trading against the toman in late September 2026.

Those rules capped purchases at 2,000 USDT per user per day on participating exchanges. They also suspended trading every night from 21:00 to 09:00 Tehran time.

The affected platforms include Nobitex and Wallex, two of the country’s largest domestic exchanges. Ramzinex and Bitpin have rolled out similar limits.

The September restrictions were set to be temporary. They were expected to run until around October 4 for Nobitex and October 3 for Wallex.

Notably, the earlier curbs applied only to Tether-rial trading pairs. They did not ban holding USDT or withdrawing it.

Why Tether keeps showing up in Iran’s story

USDT matters in Iran because it offers a digital stand-in for the US dollar in an economy heavily squeezed by US sanctions. Domestic exchanges have become key on-ramps for dollar-pegged tokens.

The US imposed sanctions on Iranian exchanges, including Nobitex, in June 2026.

Tether itself has acted against wallets tied to the central bank. The company froze approximately $344 million in April 2026 and $131 million in July 2026 linked to CBI-associated wallets.

Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic previously identified over $507 million connected to Iranian USDT acquisitions. That figure suggests the central bank itself had been an active buyer of the stablecoin.

The same institution now tightening retail access to USDT appears to have been accumulating it, before Tether froze a large chunk of those holdings.

What this means for traders and exchanges

For exchanges like Nobitex and Wallex, the risk is operational. They already face US sanctions pressure and a run of temporary trading caps. Losing banking rails would hit their core business of converting rials into crypto.

Tether’s freezes show that issuers can and do intervene when wallets are tied to sanctioned entities. Iran’s own restrictions show that domestic regulators can squeeze from the other side. Users caught in the middle face pressure from both ends: the issuer can freeze tokens, and the local central bank can cut off the rails used to buy them.

Key things to watch include which exchanges end up affected by the account blocks, whether the temporary September limits get extended, and how the rial responds. Any further Tether freezes linked to Iranian entities would also signal how tightly the issuer is policing these flows.