Yea it does seem like ships *are* currently paying though and the IRGC does seem to have a decent process for making sure passage is in concert with them.
But they don’t even seem to have a preference for payment, it’s just more of a “what do you have ready that we can make work” and because they have access to foreign desks, they’ll take that too.
Like they are buying a shit ton of munitions and MREs and other supplies from Russia and China right now, so I have no doubt that they can manage to find use for currencies that can be laundered though regional desks there.
When I did the investigation into how Russia was paying Wagner, it was all in Binance p2p related desks and Russian OTC markets that went Russia ->Nigeria->BTC/Binance->European desk->Wagner in Donbas and the flow was massive.
People don’t realize that outside of the West p2p currency exchange sites do tremendous volumes offbook. Like there is a Russian shipping company that operates in former USSR states, that owns like a dozen illegal regional desks, and they probably do more daily trade volume than Kraken, all in just regional currency exchange.
It’s such big business, that there are directory sites that list all the sketchy OTC desks as a price aggregator, and many of those directory sites are worth tens of millions of dollars, all without ever touching funds