The Central Bank of Iran (CBI) plans to block rial bank accounts and payment gateways belonging to selected crypto exchanges, citing concerns over market manipulation in domestic Tether trading, according to a report on the central bank's intentions.

The planned measures target two operational chokepoints: the rial-denominated bank accounts exchanges use to hold customer deposits, and the payment gateways that move local currency in and out of trading platforms. Without access to either, Iranian users lose their primary on-ramp for funding accounts with rials.

The move extends a restriction campaign that began in late September, when the CBI introduced temporary limits on USDT trading against the toman. Those rules capped purchases at 2,000 USDT per user per day on participating exchanges and suspended trading entirely each night between 21:00 and 09:00 Tehran time.

The affected platforms include Nobitex and Wallex, two of Iran's largest domestic exchanges. Ramzinex and Bitpin have adopted similar limits voluntarily. The September curbs were framed as temporary, with an expected expiry around October 4 for Nobitex and October 3 for Wallex. Notably, the earlier restrictions applied only to Tether-rial trading pairs — they did not prohibit holding USDT or withdrawing it from exchanges.

The escalation lands on an already squeezed sector. The US Treasury sanctioned Iranian exchanges including Nobitex in June. Tether, the issuer of USDT, has separately frozen approximately $344 million in April and $131 million in July held in wallets linked to the Central Bank of Iran itself. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic previously identified over $507 million connected to Iranian USDT acquisitions, a figure suggesting the central bank had been an active buyer of the stablecoin before the freezes.

That contrast shapes the market-structure stakes. The same institution now tightening retail access to USDT appears to have accumulated the token at scale, before Tether froze a large portion of those holdings. Issuer-level freezes and domestic banking cutoffs now press on Iranian users from both directions: Tether can freeze tokens in sanctioned-linked wallets, while the CBI can sever the local-currency rails used to acquire them.

For exchanges such as Nobitex and Wallex, the risk is operational rather than reputational. They already operate under US sanctions pressure and consecutive rounds of temporary trading caps. Losing domestic banking rails would strike at their core business model — converting rials into crypto — and could force a migration toward peer-to-peer channels that fall outside regulated payment infrastructure.

The immediate questions are which exchanges the CBI will actually cut off, and whether the temporary September limits — nominally set to lapse in early October — get extended or made permanent. Any further Tether freezes tied to Iranian entities would signal how aggressively the issuer continues policing sanctioned flows. The fate of the toman's informal dollar peg on domestic exchanges, sustained largely through USDT liquidity, will hinge on how these measures land.