Hidden financial warfare? Iran uses stablecoins to collect tolls through the Strait

Original Title: 《A Hidden Financial War? Iran Uses Stablecoins to Collect Strait Tolls》

Original Author: Mahe, Foresight News

On April 2, Garib Abadi, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Iran, publicly confirmed at a routine press conference in Tehran that all supertankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz must pay tolls to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and that the payment channels are explicitly excluded from the dollar settlement route. This statement officially institutionalizes rumors that had previously circulated in the shipping industry—Iran is no longer content to use traditional tools of geopolitical brinkmanship; it is turning control of the strait into a financial experiment aimed at dollar hegemony.

The speed at which the charging mechanism is rolled out has exceeded market expectations.

Citing internal naval documents of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Bloomberg reports that the system completed its technical deployment by the end of March. Iran’s only two options for receiving the tolls are: RMB wire transfer or settling in U.S. dollar stablecoins via a decentralized network.

Iran’s customs authorities have set up a dedicated cryptocurrency exchange window on Qeshm Island to ensure that funds are converted into rials quickly after they are credited, or transferred to overseas accounts.

This arrangement has been precisely engineered.

Traditional international shipping settlements rely on the SWIFT network and the correspondent-banking system; any transaction involving Iran would trigger the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s secondary sanctions. Meanwhile, the combination of China’s cross-border payment system and public-chain networks builds a parallel channel that bypasses dollar monitoring.

According to statistics from London shipping brokerage Braemar, at least two oil tankers flying unidentified flag-of-convenience registries completed RMB payments and safely passed through the strait by the end of March. Iran’s Parliamentary National Security Committee, in the “Hormuz Strait Transit Management Bill” passed on March 30, further provided domestic legal endorsement for this mechanism.

Worth noting, Iran also sets differential fee pricing for ships based on the degree of geopolitical association.

Citing information from insiders, Bloomberg reported the oil-charging standards for the Strait of Hormuz: starting at $0.5 per barrel, divided into 5 tiers depending on different relationship countries.

The first tier is special pricing for allies—China and Russia at $0.5–0.7 per barrel—with dedicated green corridors, and regular reporting enables free transit.

The second tier is friendly partners, such as India and Pakistan, at $0.8–0.9 per barrel.

The third tier is neutral countries—African countries, Southeast Asia, and Latin America—at $1 per barrel; they need to file a declaration, and after checks confirm there are no hostile assets, they are cleared to proceed.

The fourth tier is high-risk countries, closely related to the U.S. but without hostile conduct toward Iran—for example, South Korea and Japan, as well as many countries in the EU—at $1.2–1.5 per barrel. Iran must monitor the entire process, and the review queue will be longer.

The fifth tier is the United States, Israel, and their allies—transit is prohibited.

Once a supertanker pays the passage fee, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps issues license codes and route instructions. The ship must fly the flag of the country that has the negotiated transit agreement; in some cases, the ship’s official port of registry must also be changed to that country. When the vessel approaches the Strait of Hormuz, it must broadcast its transit password via very high frequency (VHF) radio, after which a patrol boat will come to meet it and escort it through the strait closely along the coastline—between a set of islands that industry insiders call “Iran’s toll stations.”

This is the first time a sovereign state has incorporated stablecoins into strategic-level payment infrastructure.

Unlike earlier symbolic moves by El Salvador to “legalize” Bitcoin as legal tender, Iran’s choice is mandatory at commercial scale. The strait accounts for 21% of global crude oil seaborne transport, with daily transit of ships numbering in the dozens.

If the mechanism continues to operate, it is expected that more than $20 billion worth of stablecoins per year will flow through digital wallets controlled by Iran, forming a gray-liquidity pool protected by sovereign power.

The deeper impact lies in the knock-on chain reaction across shipping insurance and trade finance. The International Group of Protection and Indemnity Clubs (IG) has issued an internal warning indicating that paying fees to the IRGC may trigger sanctions-compliance risks for the EU and the UK, leading to policies becoming invalid. This forces shipowners to make a brutal trade-off between shipping economics and legal risks: rerouting via the Cape of Good Hope adds 15 days of voyage time and tens of thousands of dollars in fuel costs; paying crypto tolls risks account freezes. Some large commodity traders have begun trying to reconstruct routes through intermediaries in Pakistan. Islamabad recently announced that it will allow 20 international oil tankers to fly Pakistan’s flag to transit—effectively providing an offshore outsourced routing channel to Iran’s system.

Iran is not the only country doing this. Russia has previously announced similar charging policies for the Northern Sea Route and has publicly considered accepting crypto settlement. This digital-finance logic of “node-izing” geographic chokepoints is reshaping the payment infrastructure for global energy trade.

When merchant ships complete USDT settlement on-chain through an agreement at the Qeshm Island anchorage, what is completed is not only the payment of a toll, but also a systematic offloading of the remaining framework of the Bretton Woods system.

The experiment’s fragility is equally apparent. Because USDT/USDC is fundamentally still pegged to the dollar and is subject to OFAC tracking, the risk point is how the IRGC’s shadow “how” will be scaled up to “decentralize” exchanges into real assets or legal tender (rials). However, as long as Iran maintains geographic monopoly over the Strait of Hormuz, this financial war using crypto as the medium will continue to rewrite the rulebook for global trade.

Original Link

Click to learn about the jobs at LvDng BlockBeats

Welcome to join LvDng BlockBeats’ official community:

Telegram subscription group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram discussion group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Twitter official account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia