Iran's Crypto Adoption, in Global Context

Iran in Context, No. 02. A comparison note. The anchor figure is ours, computed from the Tehran Index registry and a published signal; the international ownership rates corroborate and are dated 2024-25.

Iran’s crypto market usually reaches outsiders as a headline about policy, not a number about scale. So we did what a benchmarking desk does with any other market: we placed it on the same axis as the rest of the world. The question is only how many people use it, and how that compares.

Ownership, in global context

The fair way to compare crypto across countries is ownership as a share of population, because absolute counts flatter large ones. On that measure Iran sits well above the world average and in the same band as the United States. The very top of the table, the Gulf and Southeast Asian hubs, is higher still. Iran is in the leadership tier, not the frontier.

The anchor is a single exchange

Here is the part that does the reframing, and it is entirely our own number. Nobitex, Iran’s largest exchange, reported 10.6 million users in its 2024-25 report. On a population of about 92 million that is roughly one in nine people, about 11.5 percent, on a single platform. That one exchange, on its own, already clears the 6.8 percent world ownership average, and Tehran Index tracks twelve more. The national total is necessarily higher, which is why the independent estimates land where they do.

Cautions, kept in view

Three, on the record. First, registered users are not the same as active owners, and we label the Iran anchor as users, not holders. Second, the national estimates vary by method, from about 13 to beyond 20 percent, so we show the band rather than pick the flattering end. Third, we deliberately use Nobitex’s conservative published figure of 10.6 million; a higher 11.5 million count and a claimed majority market share appear in reports we currently hold at perimeter, and we do not lead with what we have not cleared. We also leave the driversof Iran’s adoption, a debated and politically charged question, out of the frame. This piece is about how many, not why.

Why it matters

Crypto in Iran gets filed under policy and treated as marginal. On the one metric that travels across borders, ownership per person, it is neither marginal nor policy. It is a mainstream consumer behaviour, above the world average, sitting with the United States, on top of a real domestic exchange layer that moves ten billion dollars and more a year. That is the second card in a series placing Iran’s leaders next to their global peers. The first, Iran’s digital banks in global context, tells the same story in a different vertical; the full map is in the Iran fintech landscape.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Iran’s Crypto Adoption, in Global Context,” Iran in Context No. 02, 23 July 2026. Iran anchor computed from the Tehran Index registry and a published signal (Nobitex 2024-25 biennial report, via Peivast); ownership-rate comparators from Triple-A (2024) and independent country estimates (2024-25).