The Iranian government wants to use cryptocurrencies to pay for trade — including with India and the other BRICS nations — and bypass the various sanctions that have been levied on it by the United States of America and the United Nations, according to various Iranian government officials and businessmen.

In August 2025, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany initiated a ‘snapback mechanism’ through which international sanctions were levied once again on Iran following a brief pause, as a response to Iran’s alleged increased uranium enrichment activities and curbs on access by International Atomic Energy Agency officials. 

The U.S. has been levying varying levels of sanctions on Iran since about 1979. One major impact of the sanctions is that Iran is cut off from the U.S.’ international SWIFT payment system.

Adapting cryptos to bypass sanctions

“Cryptocurrencies provide new ways to do business and to pay for trade,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Speaker of the Iranian Parliament said while speaking at the deBlock Summit, Iran’s first international blockchain conference, which is also backed by the Iranian government. “So, they can support independent nations. We want Iran to become a regional, and even global hub in blockchain technology and digital trade.”

“We want to do trade with other countries where we pay in digital currencies,” Mr. Ghalibaf asserted. “It is a necessity for us.”

The Speaker said that incorporating cryptocurrencies requires the appropriate technology, which the Iranian government is working on. 

“The Iranian Parliament hereby declares its readiness to work with academics, researchers, and businesses in this area,” Mr. Ghalibaf said. “We want to attract as much investment as possible in digital currencies.”

A push for de-dollarisation

Pooria Asteraky, chairman of the deBlock Summit, said that cryptocurrencies, being a decentralised form of money, are a technological tool to achieve de-dollarisation, or a move away from the U.S. dollar as the primary international currency.

“Cryptocurrencies are a decentralised form of money, not to be run by any particular government or political block,” Mr. Asteraky said. “It is the first technological tool for de-dollarisation. BRICS is meant to get rid of centralisation by reducing the role of the dollar, and reduce the amount of dollars held in countries’ assets.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly warned the BRICS countries to desist from forming a ‘BRICS currency’ and move away from the dollar, saying he would impose punitive tariffs on these countries if they do so.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs has made its stance on the matter clear. “De-dollarisation is not part of India’s financial agenda,” the Ministry’s spokesperson said in August 2025.

Need for better regulations

However, despite Mr. Ghalibaf’s assertions, the private sector participants in the Summit said that Iranian regulations on cryptocurrencies and blockchain left a lot to be desired.

“There is not a proper transparent regulatory environment for blockchain or cryptocurrencies to prosper in Iran,” Ehsan Mehdizadeh, CEO and founder of Wallex Iran, the country’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges said during a panel discussion. “You can’t say you are a country under sanctions and yet you don’t want to use new financial systems. The regulator has not arrived at a good understanding of blockchain technology.”

“The SWIFT payment system has been cut off for us, so perhaps cryptocurrencies and blockchain can help,” Mr. Mehdizadeh said. “Digital and crypto currencies are one way to get around sanctions.”

State of Iranian regulations

Currently, the Central Bank of Iran is the sole regulator for the crypto market in the country. It has introduced several restrictions, including blocking gateways that allow the Iranian Rial to be converted into cryptocurrencies. Crypto mining — the energy-intensive act of creating cryptocurrencies — has been allowed, but policymakers are raising questions on how to regulate those activities as well. 

“The council set up to prevent money laundering had banned cryptocurrencies, but the head of the Iranian Parliament questioned this,” Shamseddin Hosseini, chairman of the Economic Committee of the Iranian Parliament noted. “These currencies do have risks. One question to be asked is how much should you pay for crypto mining. Should these activities be entitled to the same rates of electricity that are charged to normal residents?”

Ali Hakim Javadi, the chairman of the Iranian Information Technology Organization, the industry body representing the country’s IT companies, said that trust is the bedrock for encouraging investments. 

“To encourage more investments, there is a need to build trust,” Mr. Javadi said. “A major driver of this is transparency, which you can get through blockchain technology. If you are speaking about contracts on paper, kept in safes, then there used to be problems with these on a legal and technical basis. With blockchain, we are working on smart contracts which are transparent and dynamic.”

(The reporter was in Tehran at the invitation of the deBlock Summit organisers)

Published – November 16, 2025 04:56 am IST

Sakura, Japan:

Her fluffy face now frail, Kabosu still flashes the enigmatic smile that made her the go-to meme dog for millennials and inspired a $23 billion cryptocurrency beloved by Elon Musk.

She’s best known as the logo of Dogecoin, but to Atsuko Sato, Kabosu is the elderly former rescue puppy who accompanies her every day to work at a kindergarten.

“It felt so strange” to discover her dog was an internet celebrity, Sato told AFP in Sakura, where Tokyo’s eastern sprawl gives way to fields of rice and solar panels.

In 2010, two years after adopting the shiba inu, Sato posted a picture on her blog of Kabosu crossing her paws on the sofa and giving the camera a beguiling look.

That image became the “Doge” meme — and later an NFT digital artwork that sold for $4 million.

“She’s pulling a weird face,” Sato laughed. “Now I think she looks really nice” in the famous photo but “at first I thought it could be trashed”.

The meme grew from an online forum post into an anarchic in-joke that bounced from college bedrooms to office emails.

“One of my friends messaged me: ‘Isn’t this picture Kabosu?’ Then I searched for it and found all sorts of memes, like Kabosu turning into a doughnut,” Sato said.

The 62-year-old is now so used to “unbelievable” events that when Tesla boss Musk changed the icon for Twitter, now X, to Kabosu’s face last year, she “wasn’t even that surprised”.

“In the last few years I’ve been able to connect the online version of Kabosu, all these unexpected things seen from a distance, with our real lives.”

‘Mona Lisa of the internet’

Kabosu spends most days resting in a cart at the kindergarten or on a big cushion at home, where fan-made Doge tributes adorn the walls.

The memes typically use goofy broken English to reveal the inner thoughts of Kabosu and other shiba inu “doge” — usually pronounced like pizza “dough” but with a “j” at the end.

“Very love. Such star OMG. So heart. Much drawing,” says one framed print using this signature “doge speak”.

Kabosu fell ill with leukaemia and liver disease at the end of 2022, and Sato is sure the “invisible power” of prayers from fans worldwide helped her pull through.

Then in November last year, a $100,000 statue of Kabosu and her sofa crowdfunded by Own The Doge, a crypto organisation dedicated to the meme, was unveiled in a park in Sakura.

Sato and Own The Doge have also donated large sums to international charities, including more than $1 million to Save the Children. The NGO says it is “the single largest crypto contribution” it has ever received.

“The Doge is the most popular dog of the modern era,” said Tridog, a pseudonymous member of Own The Doge, describing Kabosu as “the Mona Lisa of the internet”.

‘People’s crypto’

Dogecoin was started as a joke by two software engineers and is now the world’s eighth most valuable cryptocurrency with a market cap of $23 billion.

“The Doge meme was pretty big on the internet in 2013 and I spent a lot of time on Reddit and other forums back then,” Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus told AFP.

Markus, who is no longer affiliated with Dogecoin, was amused by the “silliness and innocence” of the memes.

Fellow founder Jackson Palmer “drank a beer and saw the doge meme and Bitcoin in the news and thought saying he was gonna invest in Dogecoin would make a funny tweet”, he said.

Markus found the idea “hilarious” and created the coin in “a few hours” before contacting Palmer and taking it live.

“Lots of weird stuff happened after that,” he said.

Since then, Dogecoin has been backed by stoner hip-hop king Snoop Dogg, “Shark Tank” entrepreneur Mark Cuban and Kiss bassist Gene Simmons, who once tweeted: “I bought Dogecoin… six figures.”

But its most keen supporter is probably the billionaire Musk, who jokes about the currency on X — sending its value soaring — and hails it as “the people’s crypto”.

Dogecoin has also inspired a plethora of other cheap and highly volatile “memecoins”, including spin-off Shiba Inu and others based on dogs, cats or Donald Trump.

– ‘Legend lives on’ –

A solitary figure wearing a Doge mask looks out over the Los Angeles skyline — this is Tridog, who says he has “worked for a dog photograph for almost three years”.

Own The Doge is his full-time job, and he preaches their motto D.O.G.E, or “Do Only Good Every Day”.

In 2021, Sato sold the viral photo of Kabosu as a non-fungible token (NFT), a digital ownership certificate that can be traded online, to a group of crypto art collectors called PleasrDAO for $4.2 million.

That makes it “a top-five most expensive photo ever sold”, Tridog told AFP.

PleasrDAO split the NFT’s value into a brand-new memecoin called $DOG, allowing many people to collectively “own” the meme.

Own The Doge has brought fans and other meme stars to Japan to meet Kabosu and Sato, and it recently secured the intellectual property rights to the famous photo, paving the way to make Doge toys, films and other products.

As a rescue dog, Kabosu’s real birthday is unknown, but Sato estimates her age at 18 — past the average lifespan for a shiba inu.

When Kabosu dies, “the world will mourn”, Tridog said, but “a legend always lives on”.

He hopes people will remember “the deeper values” behind the Doge meme: “the wholesomeness, the silliness, the not taking yourself too seriously.”

 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)