Iran demands Bitcoin fees for ships passing Hormuz during ceasefire
ft.com
ft.com
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/technology/binance-employ...
> People in Iran had gained access to more than 1,500 accounts on the Binance platform over the previous year. About $1.7 billion had flowed from two Binance accounts to Iranian entities with links to terrorist groups, a possible violation of global sanctions. And one of those accounts belonged to a Binance vendor.
> After uncovering the transactions, the investigators reported them to top executives, according to company records and other documents reviewed by The New York Times.
> Within weeks, Binance fired or suspended at least four employees involved in the investigation, according to the documents and three people with knowledge of the situation. The company cited issues such as “violations of company protocol” related to the handling of client data.
[..]
> But internal warnings about the Iranian transactions surfaced last year, in the months before President Trump granted a pardon to Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, who had spent four months in federal prison in 2024 for his role in the firm’s crimes. The Trump family’s crypto start-up, World Liberty Financial, has forged close business ties with Binance, and Mr. Zhao was a guest this month at a conference at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla.
This all sounds more like a TV show script than an actual thought-out plan to me.
Lightning is just an off-chain out-branch, which will eventually be re-integrated onto the main blockchain (based on its original funding/terms). The benefit of this is that single entities can branch off the main blockchain, which is limited in its total blocksize/capacity.
The only limits are those by the handling lightning institution. This differs from bitcoin's main public blockchain, which rewards/creates approximately six blocks /hour, each with a limit of just a couple megabytes.
It seems like a major issue when dealing with multimillion dollar transactions.
Let's say I have 1 BTC. I buy something for 1 BTC on lightning network A. Simultaneously (within nanoseconds) I buy something for 1 BTC on lightning network B. I never plan to use BTC again (or if I do, I will use a different wallet, etc.) Do I just get two purchases? Is there a meta-network clearing house, and if so, why are there many disjoint networks.
Or do I need to have moved my BTC into the lightning network A or B before I spend it?
You have to lock your bitcoin on the main chain in a script that shares the bitcoin between you, and another lightning network user (typically a hub)
The trick is that a lightning transaction happen by signing transactions to the other party that changes the way the bitcoins are split, without broadcasting it to the main chain. You only broadcast to the main chain when you want to unlock the bitcoin. Broadcasting an earlier transaction will result of you losing the found because subsequent transaction contains secrets that allow the other party to take them.
Basically a Lightning connection (or channel) is two parties locking up some money (in any amount and any split they want) and then repeatedly re-agreeing on what the current split is. At any time they can close the channel which unlocks the money according to the latest agreed split. It's cleverly set up so that if either one cheats (by trying to finalize an earlier split), the other one gets to overrule it and keep 100%.
The most money that can be transferred is when the split is 100% to one party. Then you need to finalize it and create a new one.
It's not as magical as its proponents think. It is better than the base protocol in some cases - if you have connections and money. The sender having to lock up actual money in advance, in the maximum amount they can foresee sending, is a real buzz killer for the sender. And if the sender is some central relay - if you want to receive via a central relay and not peer to peer - you'll have to convince them why they should do that. Usually by actually prepaying, in real bitcoins, a few percent of what you want them to lock. Which is more than the transaction fee for a nontrivial base layer transaction.
To date, my own full verification node rejects all lightning/segwit blocks, until a concensus level of 6+ is reached. I think both were BIP errors, but rejoined the main concensus network ~2018.
Also participated in the O.G. bitcoin hardfork, back in August 2017, supporting the larger_blocks camp (but now mainchain, only).
Not on the lightning network. Fees are used to incentivize or disincentivize routes across channels.
> The institution handling this offchaing lightning branch can implement fees in whatever structure you agree to transact, including percentage based.
No institution is needed. Even if one is used as an intermediary, when using lightning non-custodially, the economics of lightning are such that fees are determined by the nodes in the payer's desired route. If it's a custodial transfer from one user to another, no routes are needed.
I imagine the seconds to pay won't be true - if they are exchanging emails and inspecting boats it's going to be an hours to days long process.
no, mate
The tracking is unique though. I don't know who had the $20 in my wallet before me or what series of payments it was a part of, but crypto has the curious property that over time, essentially all crypto money will have at some point passed through wallets associated with controversial entities or transactions.
It would, at the very least, alienate the gulf states and would likely result in international sanctions.
Links to Pakistan and Israel statements here: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/8/us-iran-ceasefire-de...
Also, I really wouldn't suggest using aljazeera.
https://factually.co/fact-checks/media/should-i-trust-al-jaz...
Hard disagree: the NYT adopts a weird passive voice that goes against its house style, along with headlines with no subject when it comes to events in Gaza[1]. Al Jazeera consistently names the doers of the verbs.
1. Once you're aware of it, it becomes impossible not to notice. It is the Wilhelm scream of news coverage.
It is not "the other side of the coin". Qatar is very much on the US side, and opposite to Iran.
Their reporting is fine, and I typically find it more informative than the US news sources. But let's not pretend you are getting the Iranian side of the deal here.
Particularly, my favorite news sources for the war is, oddly enough, FT
Yeah, I agree - I have the same objections to ajazeera that I have to RT, CNN, Fox News, NYT, etc. - they are each overwhelming pressure from controlling corporations and states that they can't shine light where it needs to be shone.
But in this case, I was really only pasting them for links to the statements by Pakistan and Iran, which I do trust them to link / quote faithfully. It wasn't meant as an endorsement of their editorial or news-gathering quality.
Even if USA insist on Israel-Hezbollah (and so Lebanon) be kept apart from any deal to end their war in Iran, it would still mean a terrible strategic and diplomatic disaster between USA and Israel, because Israel Gov' will be left with two terrible scenarios:
1) Trump Admin' will concede to Iran they'd be leaving the region and leaving Israel to defend itself alone, because the Hormuz being open for business and the Gulf states being spared would be enough; or
2) USA will have to resume hostilities, meaning domestically Trump will have to explain the US Military is obliged to continue the war effort for as long as Israel want.
IMHO don't see how Israel-US can politically survive those two scenarios.
Is that such a bad thing?
Lest you blame the Jews we see the same sort of thing happening with India/Pakistan--fortunately the Islamists do not control the Pakistani bombs, but they keep trying to egg on war with India--a war that could only end with the nuclear destruction of Pakistan. And the Islamists have enough power that Pakistan can't just go after them without causing a civil war. That's why the mess in Afghanistan--Pakistan was exporting the problem. And now it's turning on them--now that the Islamists have a country they control they're looking to take Pakistan.
But ultimately Nixon was right. America getting out of Vietnam was a good thing.
Why would ending the war mean handing the world to the Iranian regime? That seems exaggerated. The iranians will charge a small toll for oil passing Hormuz, why would the US care? They have oil.
[1] https://x.com/CMShehbaz/status/2041665043423752651
[2] https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1163657967133...
[3] https://x.com/IsraeliPM/status/2041714151374856232
[4] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/8/hundreds-of-casualti...
[5] https://x.com/Tasnimnews_EN/status/2041886432239788297
That's not really what the source says. There is no ceasefire agreement in force at all (only a basis for negotiations with Iran), let alone one that covers Hezbollah.
> Multiple diplomatic sources told CBS News that President Trump had been told that the ceasefire announced Thursday would apply to the Middle East region, and he agreed that included Lebanon. Mediators believed the ceasefire to include Lebanon, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced that it did. Araghchi also said it was included.
> On the day of the ceasefire, a White House official told CBS News that Israel had also agreed with the terms of the deal that Pakistan had helped to broker.
> However, the U.S. position shifted following a phone call between Netanyahu and Mr. Trump. Two sources familiar with the matter told CBS News that the changing U.S. positions, and the disjointed remnant of the regime in Iran, are making the diplomacy highly complex.
> Vice President JD Vance told reporters on Wednesday that there was a "legitimate misunderstanding" about the terms of the ceasefire, but he placed blame on the Iranians for misunderstanding that it included their proxy forces in Lebanon.
It's great to see that Israel has veto power over US foreign policy.
Like any other state, Israel has the ability to enter into its own agreements; no one can consent on its behalf and then inform it that it's part of a deal.
(Edit- missing negative)
The US doesn't need to "side with Iran" on anything: ship captains, owners and insurers are free to gamble their ships and payloads against Iran's resolve and strike capabilities, my assumption is they like to predictability make money, and not losing customer's billion-dollar payloads is part of that.
Having your ship blown up won't guarantee the US will consider the ceasefire violated, history is littered with post-armistice engagements and deaths.
Would you go to your normal job tomorrow if someone who has a history of carrying out threats has threatened to kill you for it?
I can spend 10 minutes looking at demographics and tell you the world is not explainable if the measuring stick is my own risk tolerances.
edit: And it seems I was wrong despite it being my initial thought in terms of used rail.
>“Once the email arrives and Iran completes its assessment, vessels are given a few seconds to pay in Bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,” FT reported, citing Hosseini.
https://beincrypto.com/iran-bitcoin-toll-hormuz-strait-tanke...
“He said that the tariff is $1 per barrel of oil, adding that empty tankers can pass freely.
“‘Once the email arrives and Iran completes its assessment, vessels are given a few seconds to pay in bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,’ Hosseini added.”
"few seconds to pay in bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,’ Hosseini added"
Maybe I'm ignorant of Bitcoin but isn't Bitcoin transactions recorded in a public cryptographically signed ledger? Isn't that literally the opposite of "can't be traced"?
We just need to watch for large transactions with the Iranian flag and boat emojis…
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/iran-warns-tankers-they...
What is to stop the ships from lying ? I wonder if Iran will do spot check of some ships to prevent this. And will boarding ships cause Trump to have yet another breakdown ?
They can probably consistently lie by a small percentage and Iran let's them get the 3% discount as an acceptable loss.
Public and observable information makes it trivial to make high-accuracy assessments about the veracity of the claim.
And $2m is sufficient budget to finance spot checks, especially given you'd have to apply them to an exceedingly small percentage of ships. A year salary of an average Iranian police guard is about 5k, for context.
Plus you can create a scenario where fraud being detected is prohibitively expensive, and may even result in the captain being imprisoned in Iran. I wouldn't expect a lot of lies.
Between this and Ukraine, the logic of a nuclear warhead deterrent might be considered a paradigm relic from 20th century.
Allow me to do a slight modification on my assessment: Iran found out they won't need a nuclear deterrent to avoid ANY future aggression; modern, cheap drones and conventional missile loadouts will do just fine. Money they would continue spending on nuclear enrichment can be better spent elsewhere, military.
They can look at Ukraine who bitterly regrets giving up their nuclear weapons, or North Korea, seemingly invulnerable despite being the most pariah of pariah states.
From the perspective of the Iranian state, it would be idiotic and irresponsible not to try to make a nuclear weapon in these conditions.
So, no, not a "nuke equivalent".
Because of China not because of the nukes.
Details on this deal are sketchy but it seems like Iran will continue charging a toll for the Strait of Hormuz (of approximately $1/barrel). You hear figures like $2 million but bear in mind that VLCCs/ULCCs can carry 2M+ barrels of oil. Also, it seems like there will be significant sanctions relief.
Here's the problem: how does Iran get paid? Normally that would be through international payments systems but the US exerts a lot of control over those and can freeze assets as they've done in the past. Part of the payments under the previous JCPOA [3] were to return money paid to Iran for oil where those payments had been frozen. Russia got locked out of SWIFT after the Ukraine invasion [4] as another example.
So I see this as a defensive and potentially temporary move to avoid the risk of asset seizure and freezing should hostilities resume. Iran may well end up with access to international payments systems again in the coming weeks, at which point this could all change.
It is interesting that crypto is being used for this but that just goes to the point that the use case for crypto is to bypass laws. That's no different here.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_nuclear_deal
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWIFT_ban_against_Russian_bank...
The US being able to just cut off people from the financial system is seen as very problematic by anyone outside the US.
This is why when cyberthreat actors steal millions in USD stablecoins by hacking a protocol or a large wallet, the very first thing they do is convert those stablecoins to something else.
Quite funny to read comments from people asking what use is crypto. Can tell they have probably never left West Virgina.
Don't think it would be that useful for Iran though as they are already RMB earners, and RMB financial markets are still a bit questionable (there is depth, I don't think anyone knows why this depth exists or what it is actually for, just state-linked banks moving paper between themselves furiously).
Not only that the Chinese Yuan is probably more interesting given they can buy more things with it from China things like consumer tech/products, chemicals and rare earths for weapon systems etc.
China has probably one on another blockchain but I am not sure how easy it is to exit their ecosystem or convert it to anything else...
Edit: Piecing together from other comments, it sounds like these tolls are denominated in USD ($1 per barrel), but as an implementation detail, they're charging in BTC as the instrument of choice, not a stablecoin.
They phrase the tolls in USD "so the price is stable", and since the whole transaction is quick, BTC entails "just a small carry risk while holding". They sidestep the stablecoin technology, which is "risky for Iran because the top stablecoins could be freezed. They are centralized."
The latter comment was downvoted, possibly for paranoia, but Iran can't afford not to be paranoid. The major stablecoins at least claim to be custodied in Western institutions in a quasi-compliant-ish manner. If the USG started strong-arming Cantor, and so forth, who knows where that would end. Iran would much rather live with a tiny taste of BTC price volatility.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47692874
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47691369
So my read of this is:
- Iran is threading the needle, working within the limited options they have in a US-dominated world economy.
- The death of the petrodollar is slightly exaggerated here, although it's a small symbolic step, and obviously the broader war is going to have implications for US hegemony.
Its successor USDS has implemented all the mechanisms to censor some addresses but if I remember correctly this hasn't been activated yet.
All the other ones: USDC, USDT, EURC and the ruble one can be whipped out easily. So more risky for them than good old dollars.
Please correct me if I missed something.
Apparently it is very recent [0]
Now I am still wondering, does the taproot asset protocol make it really uncensorable? because on Ethereum an address can be blacklisted by Tether and the USDT frozen (through the ERC20 contract I believe).
And I would be a bit surprise that Tether, which is more and more integrated and compliant with regulations, would start minting USDT on a system that doesn't have an asset freezing mechanism...
- [0] https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/03-31-2026-tether-rei...
I.e. the moment you want to exchange the stablecoin token for the underlying asset (being it fiat USD, gold or whatnot) the stablecoin issuer can refuse to do that exchange for whatever grounds they have - probably based on regulation. So if a sanctioned entity (russia, iran) owned that token before, it is in the history and the stablecoin issuer can refuse to swap.
BUT: Good luck tying the public keys to real-world entities like russian goverment. Other than on-chain with bitcoin, you would only revel the public key if you traded with that entity, and are part of the lineage. The keys are not revealed to the entire world.
Plus, this also does not prevent fungibility of the token, you can still transfer the token to whatever other wallet you like, selling it to someone who does not care/check if it is tainted.
Also right now Tether do not declare any USDT minted or in circulation on Bitcoin on their "Transparency" page [0]
But once again this is very new...
As for the technology, issuing a fungible token on bitcoin can be done in minutes using tapd. Download and a couple of commands + one single anchor bitcoin transactions, and the token is minted. Just government regulation around stablecoins hasn't caught up (and probably won't, because banks will lobby against abolishing themselves).
I wish it need not have happened in my time
It then has seven different citations after it.
Why are you taking what the Trump admin says at face value, anyways? Are you still a fool after all these years? This is like "fool me a 10,000th time" by now haaha
This statement is very rarely true.
If there was another route, the oil would have found the way.
Five years at 2mil per ship will make Iran rich.
had the US had any real plan to empower the Gulf states against Iran there would already be backup routes
If there were viable alternatives to the Straight, the US would have attacked Iran decades ago. Every US administration has had people in the wings desperate to "Fix" the Iran situation, but only Trump was stupid enough to try it.
Meanwhile, the actual production is meaningfully damaged, and for at least a couple years.
This is an energy crisis.
Actually, this is extortion. Meaning that it is done under threat of violence. Worse yet, the US military may end up enforcing this, and collecting on a share of the fees.
It won't take very long for Iran to recoup the damages. After that, why keep the fees going? Because it's free money, that's why.
The strange this is, if the US and Iran can partner on this, that would lead to a weird peace, because they both stand to benefit, meanwhile countries that depend on the straight (Korea, Japan, etc.) have to pay the bill.
not really; you would have to pay to run an oil pipeline through another country's territory even if that country wasn't bearing the cost of maintaining the oil pipeline
the strait isn't international waters -- it's part of Iran and Oman's territorial waters
I think any such pretenses were abandoned right off the start.
Spain, Argentina, Kenya, Indonesia, Kuwait and countless other countries haven't bombed any civilian infrastructure either and yet they will be affected by the aggressive posture around international maritime traffic.
Are you expecting that Iran will not apply the fee to ships that sell oil Malesia or South Africa?
Their only defense against being bombed was using their geopolitical position to its advantage. Their own civilian infrastructure was bombed by the US-Israel axis, with the support of the Gulf states.
I fully expect Iran to apply fees on every ship going through, and they should.
Spain, Argentina, Kenya, Indonesia and countless other countries are paying for the aggressive and reckless actions of the US-Israel axis.
That's the situation of the country where I live btw. I don't blame Iran for using the weapons at their disposal for survival, I blame the rogue states that attacked Iran and forced their hand. Let's not forget that Iran could have done it at any time in the past decades, and showed restraint in doing so, even with all the sanctions and Israeli aggression.
So yeah, I don't see Iran paying much attention to the UNCLOS.
So basically, Iran say "here, you have to pass through our or Oman's waters, we will let you, but please pay a toll for the derangement, that we will share with Oman."
There are massive maintenance costs for the open sea with how we utilize it. Maritime security and policing, navigational infrastructure, weather reporting, radio repeaters, international bureaucracy, etc.
Global maritime trade is extremely costly. It's simply hidden behind opaque public spending on things you don't think about. In all likelihood it's a sunk cost that would ballpark around a few hundred billion dollars annually, invisible money spent just to keep things running at the scale and reliability that they do.
Now the maritime traffic passing through the Strait of Hormuz may only partially overlap with this spending, but people greatly overestimate just how "cheap" maritime activity actually is.
This conflict has been an interesting case of watching mass hysteria interact with propaganda in the newform, rapid pace of media that exists in the internet age. The amount of wild conjecture, speculation, misinformation is the most extreme I've ever seen it, eclipsing even the 6 months of nonsense that was spurred on by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Who were they quoting?
It’s just Pax for those parts of the world that America and its allies are not invading (and other non-allied examples like Russia invading Ukraine).
But a typical top-comment about how America Did a Bad Thing Which Ruined The Good American-lead Times.
Aren't you making the very point you purport to refute? What's so different about this than Rome circa 50 BC? They even invaded Persia!
But for the party with the most responsibility for blowing it all up I'd like to nominate Rupert Murdoch. Most visibly with Fox News, but really his entire media empire
Hear, hear.
I'm rooting for the fast uptake of STV across the US.
This fascination with ignoring that everyone in this disaster is the 'bad guy' (yeah including the US) is very bizarre.
An American Iranian expert which studied this region for 20 years predicted that Iran will do a nuclear test in September, ahead of the mid-term elections. We'll see.
Oh crud I just opened a can of worms with that, didn't I?
The regulation is often at the state level, the most representative form of legislation possible, often varying from state to state creating the freest system/market where you can chose to live in a less or more regulated state.
When at the federal level it is as the DIRECT result of the social impact it previously caused not because the government just wanted to restrict freedom but freedom was tried and in this situation not sustainable on a societal level.