The End of Currency Devaluation: Can Crypto Assets Become a Lifeline?

The story of the Iranian rial sounds like magical realism. In just 40 years, the exchange rate skyrocketed from 70 to 1 USD to 1.4 million to 1 USD—this is not a typo. Even more outrageous, it has continued to fall in the past six months—purchasing power has been halved directly. Ordinary people cannot accept this insulting devaluation and have taken to the streets in groups, loudly cursing the central bank and government. One bank president resigned overnight to avoid public pressure, plunging the entire market into chaos.

What happened in this extreme situation? Interestingly, when the official currency completely loses credibility, the people start to find their own solutions. Although the government nominally allows cryptocurrency trading, it then cracks down on mining and encourages reporting—under this contradictory policy, ordinary people simply use USDT secretly for daily transactions and settlements. BTC and stablecoins are gradually evolving into real "hard currencies," not just investment assets.

It sounds crazy, but industry insiders believe this is reasonable. Bitwise's CEO publicly stated that in an era of sustained global uncertainty, Bitcoin provides ordinary people with a safeguard to protect their assets. VanEck's researcher bluntly said: when economic sanctions combine with currency collapse, decentralized assets become the only safe haven available. No matter how tightly governments try to prevent it, the enthusiasm for private transactions is growing ever stronger.

History often repeats this script. Once conflicts erupt, fiat currencies are always the first to suffer. Iran's case is not an isolated incident—such events have happened countless times in the past and will continue to happen in the future. When national systems temporarily fail, ordinary people face a cruel choice: hold devalued paper money and watch their assets shrink, or take risks to find new ways to protect their wealth.

So the question is: in such chaos, would you choose the traditional safe haven of gold, the digital asset route of Bitcoin, or something else? Perhaps there is no absolute answer, but one fact is clear—when trust collapses, decentralized assets become the last lifeline.