Hundreds of thousands of mourners flooded the streets of Tehran on Sunday, chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” during funeral prayers for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The 86-year-old supreme leader was killed in joint US-Israeli airstrikes on February 28, and the reverberations are still shaking everything from oil futures to Bitcoin order books.
The crypto flight from Tehran
Nobitex, Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, reported a 700% spike in outflows immediately following the February 28 strike. That translates to nearly $3 million in withdrawals on a single day, an extraordinary figure for a platform operating under some of the world’s heaviest sanctions regimes.
The new round of US sanctions has specifically targeted Iranian crypto infrastructure, suggesting Washington is well aware that digital assets have become a critical financial lifeline for ordinary Iranians.
Bitcoin’s geopolitical stress test
