Banks Bail on Traders Over Iran Tensions, $USDT Steps In Like a DeFi Superman

The Iran war is accomplishing what three years of keynote speeches at Consensus couldn’t: finally getting commodity traders to touch stablecoins without flinching.

Luke Sully, CEO of Haycen—a stablecoin shop built for trade finance degens—tells CoinDesk that Western banks are ghosting commodity traders faster than a bear market ex from a crypto VC, all thanks to compliance jitters around the conflict. “Since the war, banks are further retreating from certain commodity flows,” Sully says. “We spoke with some commodity traders who are getting debanked now.” Translation: your bank account isn’t closed—it’s geopolitically inconvenient.

The $2 trillion problem

Turns out, banks are sweating over the possibility that a seemingly clean transaction involving firms in Oman or other Gulf hubs might be six degrees of separation from a sanctioned Iranian entity. Rather than play compliance whack-a-mole, some institutions are just hitting the eject button entirely. Cue the $2 trillion trade finance gap, where international trade deals—already 90% funded by non-bank lenders—are left scrambling. Private credit funds, the unsung heroes of this circus, are stepping in to finance everything from helium hauls out of Qatar to manganese shipments from South Africa, all for a sweet 15% annualized yield. But here’s the plot twist: even these financial cowboys still need banks to settle payments. And now that lifeline’s sputtering.

Stablecoins to the rescue

Enter $USDT—the digital dollar that refuses to stay in the crypto casino. Tether’s flagship token is quietly becoming the duct tape holding global trade together. From Lagos to Jakarta, commodity traders are ditching SWIFT for onchain rails, and $USDT is their vehicle of choice. The numbers? Yeah, they’re stupid: $300 billion market cap by 2025, growing at roughly 50% a year. Transaction volume? Over $4 trillion in 2025 alone, making up about 30% of all onchain activity. “Tether is soaking up a lot of the payments flow,” Sully says. “If you want to make a one-time payment into an emerging market, $USDT is helping.” It’s like sending cash through a wormhole—no KYC, no 7-day settlement, just “here’s your $500K, go buy some copper.”

The appeal is simple: $USDT is everywhere. So much so that people don’t even blink at receiving it. “There is so much global $USDT liquidity that people don't mind sending or accepting it as payment,” Sully adds, “because someone in their country will eventually swap it for dollars.” It’s not even about crypto anymore—it’s about not getting left holding an empty invoice while your bank lawyer debates national security with Zurich.

That said, Sully’s not popping champagne just yet. This isn’t a revolution—it’s a hack. “This is more of a workaround for these people than a solution for trade finance in general.” More Band-Aid than blueprint.

A different problem

Meanwhile, the chaos is spawning some wild side effects. Sully cites reports of bitcoin being used as the “currency of choice” for paying safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz—the world’s most expensive shipping lane for oil. Apparently, when geopolitics turn spicy, some prefer their bribes denominated in satoshis. “It shows that trade finance is increasingly being led and managed by non-bank actors and non-bank ways of transacting,” Sully says. In other words: the system’s not broken—it’s being rebuilt in real time, by people who’ve given up on banks entirely.

Haycen’s betting big on this shift. The firm issues USDhn, a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin with trade finance in its DNA. Their pitch? Cut the chaos. “Funds don't get lost for seven days,” Sully says. “You can log in, see your deposits and counterparties in one place, and settle instantly.” It’s like ERP meets DeFi, minus the Excel nightmares.

Unlike the usual stablecoin crowd—obsessed with onramps, exchanges, or paying for JPEGs—Haycen’s playing 4D chess. “Every other stablecoin business is a payments business or a crypto trading business,” Sully says. “We're solving a different problem.” And that problem—moving money across a fractured, de-risked, sanction-happy world—is only getting gnarlier.

Ironically, the greatest catalyst for crypto adoption might not be a bull run, a ETF, or Elon tweeting about