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 U...