Iran Orders Licensed Crypto Miners Off the Grid During Winter Power Squeeze

Iran’s state electricity system had ordered licensed cryptocurrency miners to stop drawing power, reports published on December 27, 2021 established, as authorities tried to preserve electricity during a winter fuel squeeze. The direction mattered because it exposed a recurring limit on industrial-scale proof-of-work mining: access to cheap power could be withdrawn when a national grid came under stress.

The December 27 record was specific about scope. Tavanir, Iran’s state-run power utility, told authorized mining centers to shut down their energy-intensive equipment. Mostafa Rajabi Mashhadi, an official speaking for Iran’s power industry, told state broadcaster IRIB that the Energy Ministry had been reducing liquid-fuel use at power plants since the previous month, including by cutting electricity to licensed crypto farms.

That is a narrower claim than “Iran banned crypto.” The measure targeted electricity consumption by licensed mining facilities. It did not establish that cryptocurrency ownership, trading or every mining machine in Iran had ceased.

A grid measure with mining consequences

Iran had already used the same policy tool in 2021. On May 26, President Hassan Rouhani announced an approximately four-month suspension of cryptocurrency mining during a period of power outages. The renewed winter restriction therefore showed that licensing did not guarantee uninterrupted access to the grid: legal miners could still be curtailed alongside other large consumers when household demand took priority.

The order also highlighted the enforcement gap between registered and unregistered operations. Licensed facilities were visible to the utility and could be disconnected administratively. Informal miners operating in homes or industrial sites were harder to identify, so cutting compliant loads could deliver fast savings without proving that the largest source of mining demand had been removed.

A report published on December 28, based on Mashhadi’s state-TV interview, supplied figures not present in the first December 27 accounts. It said the licensed shutdown was expected to release 209 megawatts for households through March 6, 2022, while unlicensed operators were estimated to consume more than 600 megawatts. Those numbers were official estimates, not independently metered totals, and the surviving reports did not disclose their calculation method.

Why Iran mattered to Bitcoin mining

The policy was internationally relevant because Iran had been a measurable Bitcoin-mining location earlier in 2021. The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance estimated Iran’s share of global Bitcoin hashrate at 4.6% in April 2021. Cambridge derived that estimate from geolocation data supplied by four mining pools whose sample represented about 37% of network computing power; it was not a census, and it did not establish Iran’s share on December 27.

That limitation is important. A government order covering “cryptocurrency mining” cannot be converted directly into a Bitcoin hashrate loss. The affected facilities could mine different proof-of-work assets, miners might already have been offline, and unlicensed machines could continue operating. Network hashrate itself is also an estimate inferred from block production, so short-term movements cannot be assigned confidently to one country without facility-level evidence.

What the record supported on December 27

The defensible conclusion was institutional, not a market-price call. Iran’s winter curtailment showed that mining capacity depended on grid policy as much as on hardware and token economics. It also reinforced a pattern visible across 2021: miners could relocate equipment across borders, but their operating risk followed them into electricity markets, licensing systems and seasonal demand cycles.

There was no verified event-day evidence in the reviewed record that the Iranian order moved bitcoin’s price or materially changed global network security. Any such claim would require a defined exchange-price window or a hashrate series linked to Iranian facilities, neither of which the December 27 sources supplied.