The war in Iran, which began in late February 2026, produced an oil shock that pushed Brent crude above $140, a sanctions enforcement campaign that froze $344 million in Iranian central bank crypto holdings, and the first documented case of a sovereign state demanding cryptocurrency payments for transit through critical global infrastructure.
Against that backdrop, the stablecoin market posted record supply ($315 billion), record transaction volume ($28 trillion), and the sharpest competitive divergence between USDC and USDT since 2022.
The war did not create stablecoin demand. What it did was compress into a single quarter a set of structural shifts that were already underway but would otherwise have taken years to become visible in the data.
