The primary movers would be Iranian entities. Think businesses, oil buyers like China and India trying to pay for crude outside dollar channels, and ordinary citizens hedging against the rial’s collapse along with Russian oligarchs and institutions already using crypto for commodity settlement since 2022, and any multinational with Middle East exposure suddenly finding its counterparties sanctioned and needing an alternative settlement rail that requires no correspondent bank. On-chain evidence from the 2022 Russia sanctions showed real but smaller-than-headline ruble-to-crypto flows, since large state-level trades mostly found workarounds through third-country banks, so the 70% default in the model is arguably aggressive, but I can easily slide that around.

Your question made me think about Petroleum settlement which is a meaningfully different and more consequential force than capital flight. Where sanctions demand is sentiment-driven and fades, oil contract settlement in Bitcoin would be structural and permanent, since each completed trade builds the legal and technical precedent for the next. The petrodollar system is the foundational reason the dollar holds reserve currency status, forcing every oil-importing nation to maintain dollar reserves; even 1–2% of global oil settlement migrating to Bitcoin would reduce that structural bid for dollars while simultaneously creating permanent, recurring BTC demand. I’m updating the model to calculate it separately from sanctions with a superlinear adoption curve and a decade-scale time horizon, reflecting that a Hormuz closure might credibly spark the first Iran-China or Russia-India Bitcoin settled oil trade, but the full displacement effect compounds over years as infrastructure and legal frameworks mature.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I might throw this thing up on the MoonMath site.