During the night of 13 April, under the cover of darkness, a series of speculations on Bitcoin caused a vertical collapse in the price of the cryptocurrency. Those familiar with the industry know that volatility in this world is quite high and speculative transactions are always just around the corner. On this occasion, however, there would be a known perpetrator and his actions would be dictated by a political logic.
The Islamic Republic of Iran would apparently have directly caused the chaos, as it needed a quick way to finance its attack on Israel.
The Iranian Operation
We are all aware of what is going on in the Middle East geopolitical quadrant, and the media constantly informs us of the skirmishes between Iran and Israel, decades-long adversaries, against the backdrop of the clash between the Jewish state and the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas. The war causes dozens of deaths daily, if not more, most of them civilians. A few days ago, Iran unleashed a drone attack against the Zionist state and, according to analysts and experts in the field of decentralised finance, paid for that guerrilla action thanks to a speculation on crypto.
Tehran, or whoever, first sold a large part of its BTC reserves and then bet heavily on futures. The transaction guaranteed the Islamic Republic an immediate gain in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Speculation in Synthesis
According to the reconstruction of Elham Makdoum, an expert in cryptocurrency geopolitics interviewed by the Newspaper, Iran allegedly sold a large chunk of its Bitcoin reserves when the price was still around 67 thousand dollars and then bet on the reduction of BTC's market value. Since they themselves caused the depreciation, they could not fail to win such a bet.
In fact, it was a pincer attack, in two directions, just to keep the war metaphor going. According to Makdoum:
'It was a very violent operation. Overnight we saw a collapse in the value of Bitcoins that we had not seen since March. In the traditional market $130 million went up in smoke, in the futures market $1.5 billion. Of that, 1.1 ended up in Tehran."
Iran and Cryptocurrencies, a Lasting Relationship
It has been years now that the country of the Ayatollahs has been active in the cryptocurrency sector. The country's relationship with decentralised finance is not all sunshine and roses, as they say, but mining is widespread in the Islamic Republic. Suffice it to say that only legal mining carried out in these latitudes corresponds to roughly 5% of the global market.
Iran is certainly not the only government to include Bitcoin and crypto in its development strategy. Its historical allies, Houthi and Hezbollah, which are active in the Middle East, also have enviable reserves of BTC and other currencies, which they use as a spare cash both to finance their political and military operations and to circumvent Western sanctions, which do not affect decentralised finance.
Keep up to date with SpazioCrypto news to stay always up to date with the latest information linking the worlds of finance and politics. A few days ago we delved into the Asian strategy to attract cryptocurrency investors on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
