Seeing the current headlines about Iran launching a Bitcoin-denominated insurance company for ships passing the Strait of Hormuz, I had some thoughts. It hits a sweet spot of Bitcoin, Insurance, and Nautical themes (basically @Anchorwatch if it were a headline on the world stage). Here are some thoughts: 1. Reserve Pool? Iran’s crypto ecosystem hit ~$7.8B in on-chain activity in 2025 (per @chainalysis), but the actual size of their bitcoin holdings is opaque. Pre-war they had ~1% of global hashrate and have been officially mining since 2018. Their current float of network block rewards still couldn’t underwrite these ships. A single loaded VLCC tanker could be worth north of $300M including both hull and oil cargo. If this were run like a real insurance company, one advantage Iran would have is the incredibly short "tail" (the window after policy issuance where a claim could be filed). Ships are only in the high-risk zone for roughly a day at most, which would allow for high capital turnover. They’d still need billions, if not $10B+ in reserves to underwrite the risk adequately. There is also huge catastrophic risk where dozens of ships under coverage could be lost all at once. It would be hard to write an insurance policy for this that excluded stuff like "war with the US" since that’s the obvious risk all market participants know about. 2. Isolated Market Iran would be the equivalent of an F-tier carrier: fully sanctioned, so no global insurance player (London, Bermuda, USA) would ever cede risk. They have to treat it as a state-run captive insurance carrier. (cc @matthewqueen84) 3. Bad Incentives There’s a misunderstanding around insurance in the Strait today. Ships have crossed while insured, but only when Iran signaled safe passage. When Iran was shooting warning shots, they froze the markets. Now they’re underwriting the ships themselves, literally acting as both the arsonist and the fireman. 4. Revenue Projections The announcement has been tied to ~$10 Billion in revenue coming from the program. With some cocktail napkin math, this works out to around $1 per barrel of oil that passes the Strait. This was the same as numbers floated previously as taxes/fees paid to Tehran for safe passage. What is interesting though is to place this in the price of an "insurance premium", which is somewhere around 0.8% of the value at risk. 5. Geopolitical Reality There is no world where the US lets Iran charge an “insurance premium” for passage when it’s just a dressed-up ransom payment. They’ll simply extend sanctions pressure and won’t let ships cross, even if they get Tehran’s blessing with an "insurance policy".