Written by: Gyro Finance
In the past two weeks, the world's attention has been focused on the Middle East.
As the two most important powers in the Middle East, the conflict between Iran and Israel not only means that the superficial peace in the Middle East has been suddenly broken and the chaos continues to escalate, but also further set off waves around the world. From the current point of view, this nuclear-induced war has not only deeply involved Iran and Israel, forcing the proxy war to turn into a head-on confrontation, but also made the United States unable to restrain its rapid intervention, and the situation is gradually escalating.
Under the risk aversion sentiment, the global market fell into turmoil, and hard assets such as gold and the US dollar rose rapidly. In contrast, the risk market was in a state of panic. It has to be admitted that the war between Iran and Israel is also spreading to the encryption field.
If we want to talk about the current Iran-Israel conflict, we cannot avoid the Iranian nuclear issue. In fact, Iran's nuclear program is earlier than expected. As early as 1957, during the Cold War, in order to prevent the Soviet Union from infiltrating the south, the United States signed the "Civilian Nuclear Energy Cooperation Agreement" with the then pro-American Iranian Pahlavi Dynasty, which opened the prelude to Iran's nuclear program.
In 1967, according to the agreement, a 5-megawatt research nuclear reactor provided by the United States to Iran was built at the University of Tehran. In 1968, Iran signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), formally establishing its legal status in the peaceful use of nuclear energy in the international nuclear non-proliferation system. The oil crisis in the 1970s further catalyzed Iran's nuclear industry. Relying on high-yield oil exports, in 1974, Iran established the Atomic Energy Organization (AEOI) and began to carry out nuclear technology cooperation with countries around the world. In 1979, with the completion of about 80% of the construction of the two reactors of the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, Iran initially established a relatively comprehensive nuclear industry system.
The turning point occurred during the Iranian Islamic Revolution. After the revolution, Iran changed from a secular monarchy to a theocracy, marking the end of the honeymoon period between the United States and Iran. The Khomeini regime was completely anti-American, and the United States also listed Iran as a blockade zone. The nuclear program, as a symbol of cooperation between the United States and Iran, fell into silence. After the Iran-Iraq War, Khomeini realized the importance of a modern military system and began to embrace the Soviet Union and other countries. In 1992, he signed the "Agreement on the Peaceful Use of Nuclear Energy" with Russia, and the two countries started high-intensity cooperation.
Since the Iranian nuclear issue was first exposed by the international community in 2002, Iran has held many multilateral negotiations with other countries on the nuclear issue in the following decade. In 2015, Iran signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, and its uranium enrichment activities were temporarily frozen, and Western sanctions were also relaxed. But then Trump came to power, which once again made the war situation confusing. The United States unilaterally withdrew from the agreement in 2018 and resumed severe sanctions. Affected by this, Iran has adopted a more proactive strategy in the nuclear industry and successfully deployed IR-6 centrifuges in 2023. Its enrichment efficiency has increased by 5 times compared with the agreement period. According to the latest data in 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report shows that Iran has accumulated 408 kilograms of enriched uranium with an enrichment of 60%, approaching the threshold of weapons-grade nuclear materials.
In April this year, the Trump administration said it would restart the Iran nuclear talks, but in early June, on June 12, 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog, formally determined that Iran had not complied with its nuclear obligations. The talks ended in dissatisfaction, and the situation in the Middle East took a sharp turn for the worse. Among them, Israel became the most restless country.
The conflict between Israel and Iran has a long history. The absolute opposition of religious ideologies determines the inevitable confrontation between the two, and the struggle for geopolitics and hegemony has made this conflict spiral. On the one hand, Iran has built the Shiite Arc to encircle Israel, and on the other hand, it has increased its nuclear technology. Israel, which does not have enough strategic depth, has retaliated frantically under the anxiety of survival, and the tacit support of the United States has made Israel fearless. Israel and Iran have shown a trend of confrontation in all aspects. The proxy war between the two has become the basic situation in the Middle East in recent years. However, this time, the proxy war buried in the dark quickly turned into a face-to-face confrontation.
On June 13, local time, the Israeli Air Force launched an open airstrike on dozens of nuclear facilities and military targets in Iran under the code name "Lion's Power". Iran was not to be outdone and launched a series of missile and drone attacks on Israel. Since then, Israel and Iran have continuously increased the intensity and scope of their attacks on each other, and the international community has intervened. In fact, looking back at the timeline of the Iran-Israel conflict, the United States can be said to be the initiator. Due to the deep contradictions between the United States and Iran over geopolitics, ideology, historical grievances, and regional hot issues, it chose to support Israel to contain Iran's development. In this conflict, the United States, on the one hand, declared peaceful negotiations and non-intervention to exert public pressure on Iran, but on the other hand, on June 21, it directed the US military to blow up three Iranian nuclear facilities, which not only further increased the possibility of the expansion of the scale of the conflict, but also significantly increased the complexity of the situation, thereby threatening global security.
Geopolitics is the core concern of the global financial market. With the entry of the United States, the impact continues to be amplified. In response to the US move, Iran proposed to close the Strait of Hormuz, which handles about one-third of the world's seaborne crude oil trade, causing global panic. Just today, international crude oil futures opened up more than 5%, and the international gold price once exceeded US$3,400.
The risk market is not having such a good time. As risk aversion intensifies, the three major U.S. stock index futures opened lower, and the crypto market suffered a heavy blow. In the past three days, the crypto market has fallen continuously. Yesterday, Bitcoin fell below the 100,000 mark, reaching a low of 98,000 US dollars, and is now reported at 101,961 US dollars. The cottage sector has fallen straight down, ETH has returned to above 2,200 US dollars, and SOL has reached 130 US dollars again. Coinglass shows that as of 9 am this morning, the entire network has been liquidated for about 559 million US dollars in the past 12 hours, with long orders liquidated for 452 million US dollars and short orders liquidated for 107 million US dollars. Among them, Bitcoin liquidated for 223 million US dollars and Ethereum liquidated for 156 million US dollars.
On the other hand, in addition to igniting the risk aversion in the crypto market, the war between Iran and Israel is also rapidly spreading to the local crypto industry. On the afternoon of June 18, the mysterious hacker group Gonjeshke Darande claimed that it had launched a large-scale attack on the Iranian cryptocurrency trading platform Nobitex and successfully obtained its source code, internal network data and customer asset data. So far, nearly $90 million in crypto assets have been affected, most of which are stablecoins USDT. It is worth noting that even if the trading platform is controlled, from the perspective of on-chain data, most of the funds have not been transferred, but directly destroyed, which is more like a demonstration.
The hacker clearly mentioned the reason for the attack, saying that "Nobitex exchange is at the core of the Iranian regime's funding of global terrorist activities. Cooperating with the Iranian regime's infrastructure to fund terrorism and violate sanctions will put your assets at risk." Although the hacker group has never revealed its identity, looking at its multiple precision strikes against Iran since 2022, most experts in the industry believe that it is the famous 8200 unit under the Israeli military intelligence department.
It must be admitted that the hacker's attack was accurate, and this move did hinder the flow of funds between Iran and the outside world. Due to the sanctions and inflation suffered for many years, the local encryption industry in Iran has actually developed quite rapidly. According to data provided by Maria Noor, there are currently 90 cryptocurrency exchanges operating in Iran, of which more than 10 operate as centralized exchanges, providing websites and applications for users to use. About 15 million to 19 million Iranians are active in the cryptocurrency market, accounting for about one-fifth of Iran's total population. It is enough to see that the encryption market has become one of the important ways for Iran to trade with the outside world.
Nobitex, which was attacked this time, is the largest exchange in Iran, with 6 million active users, 68 million transactions per year, and a market share of almost 87%. Reuters once reported on this project, saying that most of Iran's domestic crypto transactions are connected to the international market through Nobitex or similar exchanges.
In addition to cryptocurrencies, the Iranian government has also invested heavily in the industrial application of blockchain technology, and has launched official blockchain projects Kuknos and Borna to promote the improvement and efficiency of financial infrastructure. Despite supporting blockchain technology, the Iranian government's attitude towards the continuous development of cryptocurrencies in the local area is quite subtle.
First of all, in the field of mining, Iran's attitude is very ambiguous. Compared with other regions where mining farms are the absolute leaders, Iran's mining industry is dominated by retail investors. In 2018, Iran became a popular destination for global mining by legalizing the mining industry and attracting a wide range of miners to come to the local gold rush. Under the rigid demand for transactions, local retail mining is common. Problems also followed one after another. Due to insufficient power infrastructure, Iran frequently faces the challenge of power shortage. Data can also confirm this point. About 300 mining projects have been approved by the government, but according to Wu Blockchain, citing data from Masih Alavi, CEO of ViraMiner, to date, Iran's legal mining scale is only 5 megawatts, while the scale of illegal underground mining is close to 2GW, which is 400 times that of legal mining. This electricity is equivalent to 5% of Iran's total electricity consumption in 2023. In this context, Iran has imposed more stringent restrictions and contractions on this industry. In 2020, the Central Bank of Iran announced a ban on individuals using illegal mining currency transactions within the country. In December 2024, the official authorities explicitly banned the promotion of crypto mining machines. So far, although the authorities have not taken further action, their attitude is obviously not supportive.
The negative attitude is more thorough in cryptocurrency trading. Faced with the erosion of official monetary sovereignty by cryptocurrency, Iran has taken strong measures and tried many times to block the exchange between cryptocurrency and rial to limit the outflow of local funds. At the beginning of this year, the Central Bank of Iran once stopped all rial payments for cryptocurrency exchanges and required all exchanges to use government-designated interfaces for transactions to achieve fund tracking and user monitoring. In February, Iran explicitly banned any local cryptocurrency advertising. After the attack on Nobitex, the Central Bank of Iran even introduced a crypto curfew policy, strictly stipulating that domestic crypto platforms are only allowed to operate between 10 am and 8 pm daily.
The various restrictions and regulations show that the government is wary of cryptocurrencies. On the one hand, under the current blockade, cryptocurrencies are an important way to develop local industries and obtain foreign exchange, and are an important trading window for Iran to trade with the outside world. Objectively, they have their own significance. On the other hand, under the dual impact of cryptocurrencies on monetary sovereignty and power loss in the mining industry, the government cannot allow them to develop at will, and can only try to strike a balance between innovation and regulation. This point is also reflected in the religious field. In Iran, where theocracy is highly concentrated, cryptocurrencies with speculative nature are naturally taboo. Traditional religious conservatives are quite disgusted with them, but Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei believes that we should keep pace with the times. The open and conservative factions also maintain a delicate balance on this issue.
Of course, whether you accept it or not, judging from the current situation, the flames of the Iran-Israel war have obviously spread from the physical space to the cyberspace and further to the financial field, and the encryption field, as a part of it, can only be forced to face this impact. For Iran, the attack on the exchange may be just the beginning, and the subsequent game between the two sides around this will only become more complex, more sophisticated, and more invisible.
As for the global crypto industry, geopolitics will become the absolute main line of the market in the short term, and risk aversion will greatly affect the trend of cryptocurrencies. From the current point of view, due to the frequent positive news within the industry, the sentiment level is still relatively mild, and market fluctuations are relatively controllable. Bitcoin's support at $98,000 is very strong, and BTC in the exchange also has a trend of leaving the market, and the Bitcoin ETF had a net inflow of $1.02 billion last week, all of which show that the market still has a positive attitude towards Bitcoin. However, the entry of the United States brings a high degree of uncertainty, and the scope and degree of its involvement will have a wide impact on the battlefield. If it subsequently causes the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the market will also usher in greater fluctuations.
In addition, it is worth noting that as the conflict has led to a rapid rise in oil prices, the Federal Reserve, which has been wavering between tariffs and inflation, will open a longer observation window. Maintaining high interest rates in the third quarter is gradually becoming a market consensus, and this move will have a more far-reaching impact on the crypto market.
