Central Bank of Iran

The Central Bank of Iran (CBI), known in Persian as Bank Markazi, reported annual inflation of 77.2% for the month to 20 May 2026, the highest reading since the wartime occupation of 1942. Daily-needs goods rose 113% point-to-point, with some items past 300%. The figure comes as the rial touched a record 1,746,000 to the dollar on 1 June before a modest recovery to 1,716,000 on 3 June, following Rubio's sequencing signal on a possible deal. OFAC's designation on 2 June of Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin and Ramzinex (the four exchanges the CBI had used to defend the rial via stablecoin rails) closed the bank's last functioning DeFi workaround, locking in over $500 million in frozen crypto assets.

The CBI governs Iran's monetary policy, manages foreign reserves, and supervises the banking sector. It has been on the US Treasury's Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list since 2019 and was progressively cut off from SWIFT and dollar-clearing networks from 2012 onwards, driving the bank towards gold, barter, and Cryptocurrency for international settlement. On 24 April 2026, OFAC added two TRON blockchain wallet addresses to its SDN entry, the first time blockchain identifiers were attached to an Iranian state institution in the 2026 conflict.

The collapse of Iran's exchange infrastructure compounds a structural problem: the official CBI rate has diverged sharply from the open market throughout the war, leaving fixed-income earners (approximately half Iran's workforce) unable to hedge against the depreciation. The OFAC designation chain now runs from the CBI itself through to the four domestic exchanges, effectively closing off both the formal and informal rails Iran used to manage dollar exposure.