Iran has reportedly demanded that ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz pay a $1 per barrel toll — in Bitcoin. Whether this actually happens is almost beside the point. The signal is loud enough on its own.
The Financial Times reported it. X ran with it. And for anyone paying attention to how money actually moves around the world, this is one of those moments you file away.
Why Bitcoin? Because Nothing Else Works for This
Think about the problem Iran is trying to solve. It needs to collect money from ships it doesn’t fully control, in a currency it can actually use, without the transaction being frozen, reversed, or sanctioned before it clears. Try doing that in dollars. Try doing it in euros. SWIFT can be cut off. Bank accounts can be seized. Assets can be frozen mid-transaction.
Bitcoin can’t be frozen. It can’t be censored. There’s no intermediary to lean on. Final settlement takes minutes, not days. And crucially — no counterparty trust is required. You don’t have to trust Iran. Iran doesn’t have to trust you. You both just have to agree to use the same protocol.
That’s not ideology. That’s just how the technology works.
The CFO’s Perspective
I spend most of my working life thinking about how money moves — how businesses get funded, how transactions settle, where the risks sit in a capital structure. Most of that thinking happens within a framework that assumes the dollar is the world’s operating system. An assumption that has served well for decades but is increasingly worth questioning.
The weaponisation of the financial system is real and accelerating. SWIFT exclusions, asset freezes, secondary sanctions — these are now routine tools of geopolitics. They’re effective precisely because the global financial system is centralised. Centralised systems have chokepoints. Chokepoints can be controlled.
When a sanctioned nation-state proposes settling a strategic toll in Bitcoin, it isn’t making an ideological statement about decentralisation. It’s solving an engineering problem. It needs a payment rail that doesn’t have a chokepoint. Bitcoin is the only thing that fits that description at scale.
The Game Theory Is Already Running
Jesse Tevelow wrote a long piece on the game theory embedded in this moment, and he’s right about the core dynamic. Once one significant nation-state uses Bitcoin for sovereign settlement — even partially — it changes the calculus for every other state. The competitive pressure to accumulate, or at minimum not fall behind, kicks in.
The US has already moved. A strategic Bitcoin reserve was announced earlier this year. That wasn’t random. It was a recognition that the game had already started, and that sitting it out entirely carried its own risks.
We’re now in a world where adversaries — nations that fundamentally distrust each other — can transact without requiring mutual trust. Only mutual adherence to a shared protocol. That’s a genuinely new thing. It has implications that will play out over decades, not months.
What This Means for Business
In the near term, not much changes for most businesses. The Strait of Hormuz toll proposal may come to nothing. But the direction of travel is clear, and it’s worth thinking through the second and third-order effects.
If Bitcoin becomes a meaningful component of sovereign settlement — even for sanctioned or constrained nations — it establishes a precedent. It creates a parallel layer of global financial infrastructure that operates outside traditional banking rails. That layer will grow. It will attract liquidity. It will become harder to ignore.
For PE-backed businesses with international exposure: the question of which payment rails to support, which currencies to hold, and how to think about counterparty risk in cross-border transactions is going to get more complicated before it gets simpler. That’s a treasury question. It’s also increasingly a strategic one.
For finance functions more broadly: the era of assuming the dollar-based correspondent banking system is the only game in town is ending. Not quickly. Not completely. But directionally, the trend is unmistakable.
The Part I Find Most Interesting
Beyond the geopolitics, there’s an argument — which Tevelow makes in his original piece — that hard money raises the cost of conflict. When you can’t print your way to war, war gets harder to sustain. The inflationary financing of military adventurism becomes less viable. That’s a long-horizon thesis, and I’d hold it loosely. But it’s not an unreasonable one.
Historically, the ability to inflate currency has been the hidden subsidy for conflict. Governments rarely raise taxes to fund wars — they borrow and print, and the cost is deferred and diffused. Bitcoin, by design, removes that mechanism. Whether that actually changes behaviour at the nation-state level is an open question. But it’s an interesting structural constraint.
The Bottom Line
Iran demanding Bitcoin isn’t a Bitcoin story. It’s a financial infrastructure story. It’s a story about what happens when the tools used to enforce geopolitical compliance — sanctions, payment exclusions, asset freezes — start creating the demand for systems that are immune to them.
That demand was always going to produce a supply. Bitcoin is the supply.
The interesting question now isn’t whether this happens — it’s how quickly, and what the incumbent financial system does in response. I’d be surprised if the answer is “nothing”.
Mark Hendy is an interim CFO working with PE-backed businesses. He writes about finance, AI, and the world at markhendy.com. Follow on LinkedIn.
Leave a Reply