Iran's asking price for Hormuz is falling. Nobody is bidding

Tehran's published terms for reopening the strait have gone from five demands to three Washington could grant on its own — while the year-end reopening market halved to a record low.

Published 2026-08-21 · analysis

Iran's public asking price for reopening the Strait of Hormuz has been coming down for ten days, and the market that pays out on a reopening has spent those ten days deciding it will not happen. On 8 August the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council set out five conditions, among them a permanent end to US operations against Iran-aligned forces in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen and Iraq, the withdrawal of US naval and air forces from around Iran, and full compensation for the two wars Tehran says were imposed on it. On 18 August the speaker of parliament named three: lift the blockade, end the oil sanctions, release the frozen assets. Polymarket's year-end reopening contract settled at 56.5% on the first of those days and 30.5% on the 20th, the lowest of its 102 settled days.

What fell off the list is the part the United States could not deliver. The man who named the five was replaced as security-council secretary within days; his successor named two on 11 August, an end to the war across the region and the frozen assets. By the 18th the regional wars were gone as well, and so was the compensation. Everything left on the speaker's list is a US sanctions-or-blockade measure that the administration which imposed it can revoke, and the blockade and the sanctions are commitments Washington already made in the Islamabad memorandum it signed in June. Three Iranian state wires carried the speaker within ninety-five minutes of one another, which is what a line meant to be heard abroad looks like in this data.

Both venues moved, so this is not one book's quirk. Polymarket's December leg lost 26 points across the ten days. Kalshi's near-identical contract on a reopening before January 2027 lost 22, from 50% to 28%, also the lowest of its 156 settled days. The near leg is starker still: a reopening by 31 August was worth 7.5% on 8 August and 0.45% on the 20th. As Iran's demands got shorter and cheaper, the crowd cut the odds of anyone paying them by close to half.

The reason sits in the same day's file. Hours after the speaker published the cheapest terms Iran has offered, the US president posted that there were "no talks or conversations going on, or scheduled", that the naval blockade remained in full force, and that the strait was already "open and operating". A price only matters if someone is at the table to hear it, and that last claim, taken at face value, makes the contract moot: a strait that is already open cannot reopen. It is also worth saying that the shrinking list is three officials from two institutions, not one negotiator, and a smaller demand from a different mouth is not a concession anyone is obliged to honour.

Oil treated none of it as news. The first official close that could have priced the 18 August exchange rose 3.09%, the 52nd percentile of the crisis's 118 trading days, the middle of the distribution on a day carrying both the terms and the refusal. That is the expected result here rather than a surprise: statement days move Brent a median 2.48% against 2.45% on days with nothing in them, a gap with a permutation p of 0.96, which is to say no gap at all. So stop reading the length of Iran's list as a distance to a deal. The terms have fallen for ten days and every instrument that prices the outcome has moved the other way. What is scarce is not an acceptable Iranian offer but an American counterparty, and until one exists the list can shrink to a single item without moving anything.

† Condition counts are read from the statement records as published: five enumerated by the SNSC secretary on 8 August, two by his successor on 11 August, three by the parliament speaker on 18 August. Iranian officials speak for different institutions and no single list is authoritative.

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