The Central Bank of Iran plans to block the rial bank accounts and payment gateways of some cryptocurrency exchanges, citing concerns over market manipulation.

What the Central Bank Is Doing

The planned blocks would target two pieces of infrastructure: the rial accounts exchanges use to hold customer deposits, and the payment gateways that move money in and out. Without access to either, users would struggle to fund their accounts with local currency.

The move builds on restrictions introduced in late September 2026, when the central bank—commonly known as the CBI—imposed temporary limits on USDT trading against the toman, the unit used in everyday Iranian pricing. Those rules capped purchases at 2,000 USDT per user per day on participating exchanges and suspended trading nightly 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 designed to be temporary, 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 prohibit holding USDT or withdrawing it.

Why Tether Keeps Appearing in Iran's Story

USDT, the dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Tether, matters in Iran because it serves as a digital stand-in for the US dollar in an economy heavily squeezed by US sanctions that have cut Iranian banks off from much of the global financial system. Domestic exchanges have become key on-ramps for dollar-pegged tokens.

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

Tether itself has acted against wallets tied to the central bank, freezing approximately $344 million in April 2026 and $131 million in July 2026 in connection with CBI-associated wallets. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic previously identified more than $507 million connected to Iranian USDT acquisitions—a figure that suggests the central bank had been an active buyer of the stablecoin.

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

What This Means for Traders and Exchanges

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

Tether's freezes demonstrate that stablecoin issuers can and do intervene when wallets are tied to sanctioned entities—as the issuer of USDT, Tether can block transfers from specific addresses—while Iran's restrictions show domestic regulators can squeeze from the other side. Users caught in the middle face pressure from both directions: the issuer can freeze tokens, and the local central bank can cut off the rails used to buy them.

Key factors to watch include which exchanges are ultimately affected by the account blocks, whether the temporary September limits are 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.