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  • 🔍 Iran Used Crypto to Control Oil. Now the U.S. Is Responding.

🔍 Iran Used Crypto to Control Oil. Now the U.S. Is Responding.

PLUS: Justin Sun just called Trump's crypto project a scam.

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Cryptopolitan News
April 13, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

The ceasefire is dead. Trump just ordered the Navy to hunt ships that sent Iran crypto.

The 15 weeks truce that broke Bitcoin to $72,700 and oil crashed 14% lasted five days.

Peace negotiations in Islamabad lasted almost 20 hours. Instead, Iran’s negotiators negotiator sat across the table from JD Vance and Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Most points were settled. The one that wasn’t, nuclear weapons, was the only one that counted. Iran would not abandon its program. Trump stormed away and headed directly to Truth Social.

“THIS IS WORLD EXTORTION,” he wrote. “I have also ordered our Navy to shoot down and destroy any drone and any ship that is found in International Waters if it’s not a part of the toll that was paid to Iran.”

That line is the story. Since mid-March, Iran has maintained a crypto tollbooth on the Strait of Hormuz charging ships up to $2 million per vessel, which is payable in Bitcoin, USDT or Chinese yuan routed outside SWIFT.

This was enshrined in law by Iran's parliament. TRM Labs estimates that the system brings in $20 million a day from oil tankers alone. Trump has now declared those payments illegal, and directed the Navy to chase down the ships that made them.

The strait never was meaningfully open amid the cease-fire. Prior to the war, 100 to 120 ships passed through each day. Under the truce, only 10 to 15 at best got through. The window lasted long enough for three supertankers, each with a capacity of 2 million barrels, to escape. About 2,000 ships and 20,000 seafarers are stuck in the Gulf.

Now each shipowner is presented with an impossible choice. Or pay Iran’s toll and face US Navy interdiction. Or remain stuck in the Gulf forever. Insurance markets are already balking at war-risk coverage. The blockade complicates the calculus further.

That fear is apparent in the data. Google search interest in the price of oil reached its highest ever level this weekend, 300% above previous peaks seen during the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022 and the financial crisis of 2008, and 235%, higher than during a pandemic spike in early 2020 when oil briefly went negative.

The managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, said before those talks broke down that it was already the largest disruption to global energy markets in modern history. The IMF was gearing up to raise its forecast for global growth in 2026. Now it is predicting a downgrade. A 10% increase in oil prices brings global inflation up by 40 basis points. Her conclusion about a rapid return to good health: “Even in a best case there will be no neat and clean reversion to the status quo ante.”

For crypto, the wider story is what Iran has now demonstrated. An entire nation state has now leveraged Bitcoin and stablecoins as a sovereign revenue tool in the world’s most important geopolitical chokepoint, routing hundreds of millions outside any western sanctions apparatus.

It’s easy for Trump to call those payments illegal. The legality and diplomatic implications of stopping ships on the high seas because they’ve paid a crypto toll is a question no one has ever had to answer.

The world is waiting to see what the Navy will do next.

POLL: The strait is effectively closed and the IMF says prices won't recover quickly. How are you positioned?

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📊 Market Watch

1️⃣ Justin Sun just called Trump's crypto project a scam. WLFI threatened to sue.

Sun pumped $75 million into World Liberty Financial and is now publicly burning it. WLFI supplied 5 billion of its own tokens on DeFi lender Dolomite and took out a $75 million loan in stablecoins, causing the USD1 pool to reach 100% utilization and lock out ordinary depositors.

Sun accused the team of secretly inserting a blacklist function into the smart contract that would grant them unilateral control to freeze any holder’s funds without warning. “This is a trap door disguised as an open door,” he wrote. WLFI responded with a threat of legal action. The token is down 76% from its all-time high and reached a new low of $0.077 last week.

2️⃣ Intel is 51% higher in eight days. Wall Street isn’t yet buying it.

Intel just posted its best eight-day stretch in nearly 40 years on news of a $14.2 billion buyback for Irish fab, a $5 billion investment in Nvidia and participation in Elon Musk’s Terafab AI chip program.

Six months ago, analysts were wondering if the company would live. It is now trading within cents of its 5-year (all-time) high. The problem is valuation. Intel’s shares are now priced around 63 times 2027 earnings, nearly four times the multiple Nvidia commands. The turnaround looks real. The stock may be even ahead of it.

3️⃣ They just downgraded everything at the IMF and said prices won't bounce back any time soon.

Kristalina Georgieva came to Washington for the IMF Spring Meetings with one message: the war in Iran has already delivered the biggest shock to global energy markets that we’ve ever experienced, and there’s no simple solution.

The IMF was preparing to upgrade its estimates of global growth for 2026. Now it is slashing forecasts across the board. Inflation for emerging markets is expected to be 4.9%, higher than a previous forecast of 3%.

The fund has warned that another 45 million people could become acutely food insecure if the disruptions drag on. Rate cuts are off the table. Interest rate hikes are back in the frame.

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