I personally think is the US's Teutoburg Forest moment [1]. Rome was capable of rebuilding legions. After all, they'd done so historically (eg after the Battle of Cannae [2]) but Teutoburg really exposed the rot and dysfunction within the Rome. I personally believe this event will be a turning point in redefining the relationships with Europe, the Gulf states and Israel.

Details on this deal are sketchy but it seems like Iran will continue charging a toll for the Strait of Hormuz (of approximately $1/barrel). You hear figures like $2 million but bear in mind that VLCCs/ULCCs can carry 2M+ barrels of oil. Also, it seems like there will be significant sanctions relief.

Here's the problem: how does Iran get paid? Normally that would be through international payments systems but the US exerts a lot of control over those and can freeze assets as they've done in the past. Part of the payments under the previous JCPOA [3] were to return money paid to Iran for oil where those payments had been frozen. Russia got locked out of SWIFT after the Ukraine invasion [4] as another example.

So I see this as a defensive and potentially temporary move to avoid the risk of asset seizure and freezing should hostilities resume. Iran may well end up with access to international payments systems again in the coming weeks, at which point this could all change.

It is interesting that crypto is being used for this but that just goes to the point that the use case for crypto is to bypass laws. That's no different here.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_nuclear_deal

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWIFT_ban_against_Russian_bank...