Cryptocurrency booms are often fueled by dreams of life-changing riches. In Afghanistan, buyers are instead snapping up digital coins in hopes of preserving what wealth they have—and keeping it out of the Taliban’s reach.
In a white-walled office beside a open-air foreign exchange market, Habibullah Timori and his four employees are making trades for customers, using their Samsung phones. Chinese-made security cameras surveil. A sign on the wall says: “Kindly refrain from demanding a loan.”
The place is Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city, an oasis in the western desert about 75 miles from the Iranian border. Timori said his Maihan Crypto is the largest of the country’s six crypto brokerages, four of which are located in Herat.
Many customers aren’t looking to buy Bitcoin. Instead, they want stablecoins, digital currencies pegged to an asset such as the dollar and designed to retain their value.
“Demand for cryptocurrencies is high,” Timori, 26, said in a video interview. “During other crises, people stored their cash and jewelry in the ground or under their pillows. This time, they’ve decided to keep it buried in crypto.”
Naser Ali, a property dealer in the city, first visited Maihan in October, paying 150 afghani ($1.73) for a 45-minute cryptocurrency training session and then registering an account with Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.
Ali, also 26, was worried the Taliban would seek to confiscate his assets, amid reports the militant group was storming into residences and taking belongings.
In November, he took $30,000 from a safe at home and converted it into Tether, the biggest stablecoin. Maihan helped him do the deal.
“I wish I’d known about cryptocurrencies sooner, before the Taliban took over,” Ali said in an interview.
It’s another example of how cryptocurrencies have found new uses in the past year in countries riven by civil strife or war. Ukraine has received more than $60 million in crypto donations since Russia invaded it in late February. And in Myanmar, the government in exile has recognized Tether as an official currency as it seeks to fund a campaign to topple the military junta that seized power last year.
The Taliban’s takeover had many unfortunate consequences for the people of Afghanistan, said Alex Zerden, a former financial attache to Afghanistan for the U.S. Department of the Treasury whose firm, Capitol Peak Strategies, advises crypto companies. It’s not surprising that people are using digital assets as a way to reduce the group’s interference in their economic affairs, he said.
The Taliban seized Herat in August, and marched into the capital two days later, retaking full control of the country after two decades as U.S. and NATO forces exited. The scenes from the fall of Kabul shocked audiences across the world.
Months later, the country is suffering under crippling sanctions. The U.S. has blocked $9 billion in foreign-exchange reserves, the economy is on the verge of collapse, and the banking system is on the brink, with people only allowed to withdraw $400 a week. Some 95% of the population doesn’t have enough food to eat, the United Nations said in March.
The militant group recently suspended secondary education for teenage girls, imposed gender segregation in amusement parks and ordered government workers to grow beards.
But for Timori, the Taliban’s return has actually been good for business — at least so far.
Maihan now handles about $400,000 in crypto transactions each week, Timori said, more than double the level before the Taliban took over.
A report last year by blockchain research firm Chainalysis ranked Afghanistan as one of the top 20 countries in the world in terms of crypto adoption. The results were weighted by purchasing power parity per capita, which favors poorer nations.
Buying cryptocurrency isn’t easy in Afghanistan, partly because it’s impossible to move funds directly from an Afghan bank account to an exchange such as Binance. Because of the sanctions, banking links with other countries are also severed.
That’s where brokers such as Maihan come in.
Timori and his staff use the traditional Hawala system, an informal way of transferring funds that accounts for about 90% of financial transactions in Afghanistan. They send money — mainly U.S. dollars — to contacts in countries such as Iran, Turkey and the U.S. Those people, in return, transfer digital tokens like Bitcoin and stablecoins to Maihan’s Binance wallet.
That means a client can bring money to Maihan and get Tether, Bitcoin or other digital currencies in return. The brokerage also keeps a supply of funds on hand for when customers want to exchange their crypto for cash.
Of course, stablecoins aren’t necessarily free of risks. Tether, which has a market cap of about $83 billion, has long been dogged by speculation about whether it’s backed one-for-one by assets as claimed.
Maihan charges a commission of as much as 1.5% on each crypto transaction, several times larger than the percentage usually levied by exchanges such as Binance. It takes in from $16,000 to $20,000 in revenue a month, according to Timori.
Timori said he gets to keep about $6,000 of that, a significant haul in a country where the average government worker pulls in about $400 a month, according to the Finance Ministry.
That doesn’t mean he has an opulent lifestyle. Timori is the sole breadwinner in a household of 11, including his parents and siblings. But he has been able to help his father pay off a $60,000 debt, a legacy of the 2016 collapse of his construction business.
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