On January 13, 2026, in the Eastern Eight Time Zone, the United States and Iran brought cryptocurrency assets onto two distinctly different narrative stages on the same day: on one side, Washington released accelerated signals around the "Clarity Act," filling in the institutional puzzle for an already formed cryptocurrency market; on the other side, the extreme exchange rate level of the rial in Tehran's black market was reported to be approximately 1,470,000:1 (according to A/B, information still pending further verification), as the original fiat currency order collapsed under the dual pressures of inflation and sanctions. In this contrast, the role of cryptocurrency assets was torn in half: in the U.S., it was incorporated into a regulatory framework and viewed as a financial asset that could be audited and allocated; in Iran, it was seen as a lifeline and a means of survival within a crumbling monetary system. The same technology and the same global ledger are being defined simultaneously as "compliant assets" and "survival currency" in these two polar scenarios, which constitutes a key perspective for observing the cryptocurrency market in the coming years.
The Game of Regulatory Clarity Heating Up
The competition surrounding the "Clarity Act" has, in fact, become a microcosm of the debate over cryptocurrency regulation in the U.S. According to market information disclosed in research briefs, the act is said to have passed the House in July 2025 (according to C, still unverified information) and is currently awaiting further advancement in the Senate and the White House. Although specific details of the text and the Senate's review timeline remain lacking in publicly verifiable materials, it can be confirmed that the act aims to delineate clearer regulatory boundaries for different types of cryptocurrency assets, placing securities, commodities, and payment tokens back into their respective frameworks, contrasting sharply with the previous few years' ambiguous state of "regulation through enforcement."
SEC Chairman Paul Atkins was recently quoted by several media outlets as "confident that the Clarity Act will be signed into law within the year" (according to A/C). In the absence of complete original texts and formal written documents, it is difficult for the outside world to accurately quantify the intensity of his wording, but the attitude conveyed by the highest regulatory levels is already sufficient to change the expectations of the domestic cryptocurrency industry on an emotional level. For project parties, once there are written standards for what constitutes a security and what issuance actions trigger registration obligations, the paths from fundraising, trading to compliance disclosure will no longer rely entirely on post-factum negotiations; for the funding side, especially pension funds, insurance funds, and sizable mutual funds, regulatory certainty means reduced resistance from compliance departments and risk control committees, significantly increasing the likelihood of including cryptocurrency-related products in asset allocation menus.
However, this optimism is not without variables. The 2026 U.S. midterm elections are widely believed to potentially change the balance of power in Congress, thereby indirectly affecting the legislative processes of various financial and technological laws, including the Clarity Act. The brief specifically points out that how the midterm elections reshape the Senate agenda and whether they lead to a reordering of the bill's advancement pace are currently unverified information and should not be overly specified as a timeline or probability forecast. It can be confirmed that the future of the bill largely depends on the renegotiation between parties regarding the balance of "innovation" and "investor protection," and this layer of political uncertainty is bound to continue reflecting on the strategic choices of U.S. cryptocurrency companies in the coming months.
The Collapse of the Rial and Street USDT
Unlike Washington's attempt to clarify rules on paper, the extreme quotes of the rial in the black market on the same day made Tehran's financial reality appear exceptionally brutal. According to figures reported by sources like A/B, the rial was exchanged at approximately 1,470,000 rials for 1 dollar in the unofficial market; this data still requires further verification, but the directional indication is sufficient to illustrate the problem: in an environment of long-term uncontrolled inflation, with sanctions and internal and external pressures coexisting, the credibility of the local fiat currency is rapidly collapsing. The officially launched digital rial was supposed to serve as a lever for modernizing the monetary system, but its advancement has been hindered by multiple constraints.
From a technical perspective, the Central Bank of Iran faces real challenges in building the digital rial infrastructure, such as limited talent, software and hardware, and international cooperation, making it difficult to reuse mature solutions from mainstream economies' central bank digital projects; in terms of sanctions, the blockade in the financial and high-tech sectors has created a very poor environment for external settlement and cooperation, making it hard for the digital rial to truly integrate into the global payment and trade network even if it goes live; and in terms of trust, long-term high inflation and capital controls have eroded residents' trust in official currency and financial institutions, making the central bank-issued digital version more likely to be viewed as a new tool for surveillance and restriction. Under the weight of these three bottlenecks, the digital rial has not only failed to reverse the deterioration of currency credibility but has, in reality, pushed more people towards off-market dollar-denominated assets.
In this context, dollar-pegged tokens represented by USDT have gradually infiltrated street trading scenes, taking on multiple functions from wealth storage to cross-border settlement. In the face of inflation spirals and currency depreciation, holding even a small amount of tokens linked to the dollar signifies relatively stable purchasing power and the potential to counter asset shrinkage; for individuals and small vendors needing to maintain financial transactions with overseas friends or trade partners, purchasing USDT through intermediaries or off-market channels and then converting it into other currencies or fiat is often more feasible than relying on a sanctioned banking system. In some gray trade and small import chains, USDT has even directly served as a settlement medium, becoming a liquidity carrier that "slips through the net" of the sanctioned system.
However, the rising rigid demand for cryptocurrency assets among the public starkly contrasts with the authorities' demands for capital flow and information control. As the rial exchange rate further spirals out of control, regulators may view cryptocurrency assets as a means of relief, acknowledging their role in specific scenarios, or they may see them as a "backdoor" threatening monetary sovereignty and capital controls, choosing to tighten control and monitoring through blocking platforms and cracking down on off-market exchanges. Under this tension, the fate of assets like USDT in Iran is likely to oscillate between the labels of "survival currency" and "illegal tool," which itself is an inherent institutional risk of digital assets in a high-inflation, heavily sanctioned environment.
The Gray Loop of Oil, Computing Power, and Military Needs
As the official financial system continues to contract, another more secretive path is emerging in Iran: the so-called "oil-computing power-military needs" digital currency loop. According to a single source B, this concept can be summarized as a chain starting from energy and ending with military needs and foreign trade: Iran utilizes its abundant and low-cost oil and gas resources to provide cheap energy for both domestic and foreign-controlled computing facilities; this computing power is directed towards cryptocurrency mining, returning globally liquid digital assets; these digital assets, after being laundered or processed in layers, are partially used to support material procurement for the military-industrial system, while some are used to rebuild foreign trade channels suppressed by sanctions through friendly countries and gray intermediary channels. Since this narrative currently relies mainly on a single source, the details and scale remain highly uncertain, but its logical direction aligns closely with Iran's real motivations under sanction pressure.
In the context of traditional financial channels being blocked, using cryptocurrency assets to bypass sanctions has become one of the essential options for all "excluded" parties in the medium to long-term game. For an economy highly dependent on energy exports and key material imports, as long as it can convert its energy into globally accepted digital assets and find enough counterparties willing to accept these assets, there is an opportunity to rebuild some form of "shadow financial system" outside the severed cross-border payment networks. From a technical feasibility perspective, the openness of cryptocurrency ledgers, the decentralization of miner networks, and the evolution of cross-chain and privacy tools are all providing infrastructure for this gray loop, but the actual scale at which it can operate and to what extent it can evade the tracking of intelligence and law enforcement agencies remains a significant question mark.
In extreme scenarios, if Iran further escalates its geopolitical confrontation, leveraging digital assets and computing power exports to maintain a barter or currency exchange trade structure with a few friendly countries, then cryptocurrency assets will not only serve as a "digital dollar substitute" for the country's residents but will also become a bargaining chip in a war economy. Research briefs warn that if such gray loops coordinate with radical actions like blockading the Strait of Hormuz, they will directly push cryptocurrency assets into the center of the global macro-hedging narrative: against the backdrop of disrupted energy supplies and soaring maritime risks, they may be viewed both as tools for circumventing sanctions and as alternative targets for some global funds to hedge against traditional financial and geopolitical risks. This dual attribute will compel regulatory and intelligence agencies worldwide to reassess the position of decentralized networks in geopolitical finance.
Two Fates of the Same Asset
A horizontal comparison between the U.S. and Iran reveals the completely different fates of the same technology in two institutional environments. The main line of U.S. regulation and legislation is to incorporate cryptocurrency assets into existing securities and commodity regulatory frameworks as much as possible, setting clear requirements for issuance, trading, custody, and information disclosure, emphasizing the protection of investors and maintenance of market order through rules and audits. Under this logic, cryptocurrency assets are defined as "compliant assets" that can be evaluated, counted on balance sheets, and included in institutional asset portfolios, with their value fluctuations and risk exposures needing to be faced transparently by the market and regulators.
In contrast, in Iran, the official attitude is caught in a tug-of-war between suppressing civilian demand and supporting national policy uses. On one hand, the authorities remain highly vigilant against the large-scale use of digital assets by the public to bypass capital controls, fearing it will weaken the effectiveness of monetary policy and accelerate capital flight; on the other hand, when the state apparatus attempts to find a way out in the cracks pressed by sanctions, it must also acknowledge the potential value of computing power and digital assets in military procurement and foreign trade. This structural contradiction causes cryptocurrency assets in Iran to bear the dual labels of "hostile tools" and "strategic resources," with regulatory attitudes fluctuating sharply depending on the scenario.
The technically neutral cryptocurrency network plays completely different roles in these two narratives: in the U.S., it is more shaped as an auditable investment target, revolving around compliance disclosure, risk pricing, and financial innovation; in Iran, it serves both as a hedge tool for residents escaping inflation and currency collapse and as a gray channel for the state to attempt to bypass sanctions and maintain trade and military supply. For global capital and computing power, this institutional differentiation is bound to bring about new geographical restructuring: some long-term funds and compliant computing power will choose to root themselves in "regulatory centers" like the U.S., enjoying the benefits of the system and institutional demand; while others will weigh between regulation and returns, navigating the "gray margins," including Iran, to take on higher political and legal risks in exchange for higher returns.
This also raises a more challenging question: regulatory friendliness does not equate to value neutrality. A country that relaxes institutional constraints on cryptocurrency assets to attract projects and capital also effectively provides a broader global liquidity environment for those actors relying on the same technology to bypass sanctions or engage in gray activities. For participants, whether in the compliance center of the U.S. or the gray margins of Iran, they must face dual risks of legality and morality—the former may be required to comply with stricter compliance and scrutiny obligations as geopolitical games escalate, while the latter may face asset freezes or legal accountability at any moment due to escalating sanctions and law enforcement intervention. Technology can remain neutral, but the institutions and geopolitical environments embedded in that technology are never neutral.
The Crossroads of Compliance and Risk Aversion
Bringing the perspective back to the timeline of January 13, 2026, the stark contrast in cryptocurrency narratives between the U.S. and Iran has become clear: the U.S. attempts to clarify the rules of the game for cryptocurrency assets through the Clarity Act, solidifying years of "negotiating while fighting" regulatory practices into a predictable institutional framework; Iran, on the ruins of a collapsing old game and the failure of its currency's credibility, is forced to bet on various digital assets, including USDT, whether as a temporary hedge for street residents or in the potentially planned "oil-computing power-military needs" loop at the national level, cryptocurrency is seen as one of the last few usable chips.
If the Clarity Act successfully passes through the Senate and the White House and is officially implemented within the year, while the Iranian rial further depreciates and the financial system continues to deteriorate, the global cryptocurrency market may simultaneously welcome two completely different waves of capital: on one side, institutional compliant funds from mature markets like the U.S. will increase their allocation to cryptocurrency assets through ETFs, compliant custody, and brokerage platforms; on the other side, there will be geopolitical risk-averse buying from regions facing sanctions and high inflation, viewing tools like USDT as a "digital dollar" that detaches from the local currency system, continuously circulating within visible and invisible trade networks. The combination of these two forces will further elevate the weight of cryptocurrency assets in macro cycles and geopolitical risk narratives, while also intensifying debates surrounding their regulatory and ethical boundaries.
For readers following this process, there are three main lines worth continuous tracking. The first is the legislative progress of the Clarity Act in the U.S., particularly the real pace of Senate review and White House signing, rather than merely relying on emotional fluctuations based on optimistic statements; the second is the evolution of Iranian authorities' attitudes towards civilian cryptocurrency use, whether they view it as a systemic risk source that must be strictly controlled or, to some extent, tacitly allow it as a safety valve to buffer extreme inflation and sanction pressures; the third is whether regional conflicts escalate to the energy and shipping levels, especially regarding the situation around key chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz, because once energy and shipping risks substantively rise, the role of cryptocurrency assets as macro and geopolitical hedging tools is likely to be further amplified, making the game of "compliance" versus "risk aversion" even more difficult to disentangle.
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