The U.S. Treasury just sanctioned Iran’s largest crypto exchange, Nobitex, along with three other Iranian platforms. Nobitex reportedly had 11 million users and processed more than half of Iran’s crypto inflows in 2025.
That’s the danger of centralized crypto infrastructure: one company becomes the choke point.
When users rely on custodial exchanges, they are not just trusting a platform to hold funds. They are trusting its executives, banking relationships, compliance decisions, geopolitical exposure, and operational security. If that exchange gets hacked, sanctioned, frozen, or pressured, users can lose access overnight.
Crypto was built to reduce dependence on centralized intermediaries. But centralized exchanges recreate the same failure points as banks, only with digital assets.
The lesson is simple: if a single platform can control access, freeze movement, or become a target for governments and hackers, it is not real financial freedom.
Self-custody and decentralized infrastructure are not just ideological preferences. They are risk management.