Just 12 hours before the United States and Israel began attacking Iran in late February, Firouz, a crypto user in Tehran, decided to act. “I was feeling all week the war would start soon,” he said.

Trusting his instincts, he moved all his crypto savings out of Nobitex – Iran’s largest digital asset platform and the central hub of the sanctions-hit country’s crypto ecosystem – to his personal digital wallet. “My main thinking was that I could potentially be forfeiting true ownership of any money left in a state-linked or state-monitored Iranian crypto service in the event of war, whether through an action taken by state authorities or as a consequence of cyberattacks,” he said.