Many people are watching Wall Street. Far fewer have noticed that mining rigs in Iran are still running through the war.

One set of numbers may reset your assumptions: globally, mining one bitcoin costs about $90,000. In Iran, it costs just $1,300.

As tensions in the Middle East keep rising, bitcoin means far more to this land than speculation.

For civilians under fire, this is not just computing power. It may be the only savings that cannot be wiped out by a government order.

State Machinery Enters Crypto Mining

Iran’s $1,300 bitcoin mining cost comes from a simple fact: the country has the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves, but sanctions prevent it from exporting them. Large volumes of gas can only be burned locally. Rather than waste it, Iran uses it to generate electricity.

That gives mining farms access to ultra-cheap power at about $0.002 per kilowatt-hour, far below the global average.

A special survival chain has taken shape: surplus natural gas becomes cheap electricity; electricity powers mining rigs that produce bitcoin; and bitcoin bypasses blocked international settlement channels, then gets exchanged in global markets for food, medicine, and machinery parts.

A January 2026 report from Chainalysis showed that wallets linked to the IRGC received more than $3 billion in crypto assets in 2025, including various sanctions-evasion activities rather than pure mining proceeds.

But not everyone can get that price.

The ultra-low electricity rates are almost entirely reserved for institutions deeply tied to the military or the government. They build their own power plants, lay their own lines, and in some cases guard mining sites with guns.

In 2021, when energy authorities tried to shut down an unlicensed mining farm, armed personnel blocked them on site. The mining rigs kept running.

In 2022, parliament passed another bill allowing certain military institutions to build their own power generation and transmission facilities.

In other words, in this system, the people mining are also the people supplying the power, and the people setting the rules.

Official estimates say about 95% of Iran’s crypto mining activity is unlicensed. These underground mining farms consume roughly 2,000 megawatts of power, equivalent to the full-load output of a nuclear power plant.

With that computing power, Iran ranks as the world’s fourth- or fifth-largest crypto mining hub.

But as mining rigs roar day and night, power grids in ordinary residential districts are frequently overloaded.

Cheap electricity has never flowed to ordinary people’s sockets.

As for those who refused to believe the risks and tried to squeeze into this chain from the outside, the price they paid was far more than $1,300.

The Hundred-Million-Yuan Lesson for Chinese Miners

News that a bitcoin could be mined for $1,300 reached China’s mining circles.

At the time, China was tightening controls on crypto mining, and miners began a global migration.

Lao Li, a veteran miner, was drawn to Iran’s electricity price, which worked out to around 0.18 yuan per kilowatt-hour. Through intermediaries, he connected with local power brokers. Because local supporting infrastructure was weak, he chartered planes to ship 30,000 second-hand mining rigs, along with transformers and containers, to Tehran.

But he did not expect it to be a one-way road.

The problems came one after another. First came the heat, which knocked large numbers of machines offline. Then came the people: local partners kept demanding more, eventually asking for as much as 30% of the returns. When Lao Li tried to negotiate, the other side simply cut the power. He called in every connection he could to mediate. Nothing worked. He lost more than 100 million yuan. He tried to move the machines to Ethiopia to limit the damage, but Iranian customs detained the equipment and would not let it leave.

In the end, that batch of mining rigs was scrapped in Tehran, and Lao Li left the country.

At the start of 2021, Iranian authorities launched a raid and confiscated 45,000 mining rigs.

People connected to licensed local mining farms in Iran put it bluntly: from 2019 to 2020, many Chinese companies entered special zones to build sites, but once the 2021 ban arrived and power was cut, “they were no longer active in Iran.”

Lao Li later said that few major Chinese miners in Iran managed to get out intact.

Much of the equipment had entered through informal channels without legal customs documents. Once policy tightened, the machines could not be shipped out, and the people could not easily leave.

When Bombs Fell, Crypto Withdrawals Jumped 700%

In late February 2026, Tehran was hit by airstrikes.

Within hours of the news breaking, Nobitex, Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, recorded a 700% surge in withdrawals.

Data showed total outflows of about $10.3 million from February 28 to March 2.

Chainalysis said it is still difficult to determine the exact sources of the fund movements, which may include:

First, ordinary civilians moving assets into cold wallets for self-protection;

Second, exchanges urgently spreading funds across wallets to guard against server damage; and third, large holders with special backgrounds moving assets overseas.

The context behind these actions is not hard to understand.

Since 2018, the Iranian rial has depreciated by more than 90% against the dollar, while domestic inflation has stayed above 40% for years.

For ordinary people and businesses, bank deposits keep shrinking, foreign-exchange channels are almost completely sealed off, and taking physical gold out of the country carries enormous risk.

At that point, a bitcoin seed phrase that can be memorized and does not rely on any institution becomes one of the few asset forms still under personal control.

The chief executive of ViraMiner, a licensed local mining farm in Iran, said about 18 million Iranians hold crypto assets, and that there are roughly 300 to 600 digital exchanges inside Iran.

Notably, Iran’s central bank explicitly bans individuals from trading cryptocurrencies, while the state has purchased more than $500 million in USDT to stabilize trade.

That gap has further eroded ordinary people’s trust in the formal financial system.

Yet this digital escape ultimately ran into a hard wall of reality. After the airstrikes, local internet connectivity was cut by 99%, causing the spike in trading volume to quickly shrink by 80%.

The desire to run was at 700%. The road left open was just 1%. After the airstrikes, bitcoin is currently hovering around $72,000.

But for ordinary people on the streets of Tehran, price moves matter little.

Once the war starts, the national currency depreciates faster, physical bank accounts can be frozen at any time, and foreign-exchange controls make it nearly impossible for ordinary people to move money abroad. At that point, bitcoin is no longer the grand idea of “digital gold.” It becomes an escape route in a time of chaos, one that needs no passport.

The people taking this route include the state machine, generals carrying guns, and far more ordinary people holding a depreciating currency and unsure where tomorrow will take them.

They use the same chain, but they see entirely different worlds.