3 Days Into the Ceasefire, 12 Ships Crossed Hormuz

Key Takeaways

• The ceasefire has not opened the strait. Kpler counted 5 ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz on April 8 and 7 more on April 9, the first two days of the US-Iran ceasefire. More than 600 vessels, including 325 tankers, remain stranded in the Gulf awaiting safe passage.
• The $40 billion US insurance facility is not the binding constraint. On April 3, the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and Chubb announced a doubled $40 billion Maritime Reinsurance facility backed by Travelers, Liberty Mutual, Berkshire Hathaway, AIG, Starr, and CNA. Five days later the ceasefire began. Three days after that, daily transits are still in single digits.
• Iran is running a parallel toll booth. Tehran has been charging vessels up to $2 million per transit since mid-March, accepting payment in Chinese yuan, Bitcoin, and potentially the USDT stablecoin, per crypto analytics firm TRM Labs cited by Fortune. In early April, IRGC members also began charging roughly $1 per barrel of oil on board. TRM Labs analyst Ari Redbord cautioned that on-chain evidence does not yet show toll payments at scale, but no amount of US reinsurance capacity can override a toll gate controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
• The underwriters already said it. On March 23, the Lloyd’s Market Association (LMA), the London trade body representing the actual war risk underwriters, stated plainly that reduced transits are “not through a lack of insurance” but because ship masters and owners judge crew and vessel safety too dangerous. 88% of Lloyd’s marine war market participants continued writing hull war risks; over 90% continued writing cargo cover.
• Reagan answered this same problem in 1987 with hulls, not paperwork. Operation Earnest Will reflagged Kuwaiti tankers as American and escorted them for 14 months with more than 30 US warships. The Lloyd’s-only approach had already failed before that operation began.

Hormuz, Day Three of the Ceasefire

On April 8, 2026, after more than five weeks of open war, the United States and Iran announced a ceasefire brokered by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. The agreed framework was a two-week pause with a 15 to 20 day negotiation window, and one core deliverable on the US side: Iran was supposed to “immediately reopen the Strait of Hormuz, restoring global oil flow.”

Kpler, the vessel-tracking firm that maritime regulators use for transit counts, tells a different story. The day before the ceasefire, April 7, 11 ships crossed the strait. On April 8, the ceasefire’s first day, that number fell to 5. On April 9, it ticked to 7. Twelve ships in forty-eight hours of “peace,” through a waterway that handled between 120 and 140 vessels every day before February 28. More than 600 vessels, 325 of them tankers, are still sitting inside the Gulf waiting for a safe window to leave.

Five days before the ceasefire was announced, the US government had already built what was supposed to be the switch. On April 3, the US International Development Finance Corporation and Chubb announced the doubling of their Maritime Reinsurance facility to $40 billion, with Travelers, Liberty Mutual, Berkshire Hathaway, AIG, Starr, and CNA joining as reinsurance partners. The stated purpose was “to help restore maritime trade through the Strait of Hormuz.” The facility has now been live for eight days and the ceasefire has been live for three. The switch is flipped. Nothing is moving.

The $40 Billion Insurance Architecture

The DFC-Chubb structure is a historical oddity. The US International Development Finance Corporation is the federal agency created to finance emerging-markets infrastructure projects as a counter to Chinese lending. It has never underwritten marine war risk. As of April 3, 2026, it does.

Under the expanded facility, the capacity is stacked in two layers.

• Layer 1, DFC backstop: $20 billion. A federal guarantee, backed ultimately by the US Treasury, absorbs catastrophic loss on insured vessels and cargo transiting the Gulf. DFC CEO Ben Black announced the expansion and confirmed six additional American insurance partners.
• Layer 2, Private consortium: $20 billion. Chubb acts as lead underwriter, setting pricing, issuing policies, and managing all claims. Travelers, Liberty Mutual, Berkshire Hathaway, AIG, Starr, and CNA entered as reinsurance partners on April 3.

Chubb CEO Evan Greenberg framed the program as a “partnership with the United States Government through the US International Development Finance Corporation.” That partnership is the point. DFC was chosen because it had pre-existing statutory authority to extend large credit guarantees at speed, without a new Congressional appropriation vote. Chubb was chosen because it is among the largest US-domiciled commercial insurers with a live marine war book. The rest of the consortium was the next layer of American capacity.

None of that required a conspiracy. It required the Trump administration to find a legal vehicle that could move the exposure into the market between February 28 and April 3. DFC was the vehicle that fit the timeline. The fact that DFC is a development finance agency, not a marine insurer, is a problem for constitutional scholars and congressional appropriators. It is not the reason the facility is failing. The reason it is failing is that the facility was built to solve a capacity problem, and capacity is not the binding constraint.

Iran Runs a Parallel Toll Booth

The binding constraint has two names: crew safety and Tehran’s toll booth. The second name is the one that the DFC press release does not mention.

Starting in mid-March, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) began formalizing a tiered access regime for Hormuz. Ships with direct Iranian cargo or diplomatic agreements pass free. Other vessels have been charged up to $2 million per transit since mid-March, with the amount assessed per ship after IRGC vetting of ownership, finance, insurance, and trading history. Ships from countries Iran considers hostile, meaning US-flagged or US-owned vessels in particular, face outright restriction.

The payment channels are not SWIFT. Iran has been accepting transit fees in Chinese yuan, Bitcoin, and potentially USDT, per TRM Labs. In early April, IRGC members began charging approximately $1 per barrel of oil on board. Lloyd’s List has described the system plainly as “Tehran’s toll booth.” The same Lloyd’s List reporting from March 25 noted that at least two vessels had confirmed yuan-denominated toll payments, and TRM Labs analyst Ari Redbord has cautioned that on-chain evidence does not yet indicate payments are happening at scale.

On April 8, the same day the ceasefire was announced, the White House publicly demanded that the strait reopen “without limitation, including tolls.” Iran responded by continuing to collect. Abu Dhabi National Oil Company CEO Sultan Al Jaber told reporters that the strait was still not open, because Iran is restricting and conditioning traffic.

This is the part of the story that the DFC facility cannot touch. Marine war insurance covers hull, machinery, cargo, and third-party liability. It does not cover extortion payments to a state actor for passage rights. If a VLCC owner wants to move through Hormuz on April 11, the Chubb policy may protect the vessel against an anti-ship missile strike, but the IRGC toll is a separate, parallel cost paid in cryptocurrency to a counterparty that US sanctions technically forbid American entities from dealing with. The policy and the toll cannot both be resolved by the same transaction.

What the Underwriters Already Said

The insurance market itself conceded the point weeks earlier. On March 23, the Lloyd’s Market Association, the London trade body representing the actual war risk underwriters, published a statement rebutting the narrative that Hormuz was shut because coverage was unavailable.

“The reason ships are not moving is not through a lack of insurance; it is a question of the risk to crew and vessel safety being assessed by the ship masters and owners as too high.”

The LMA also noted that 88% of Lloyd’s marine war market participants continued writing hull war risks, and over 90% continued writing cargo cover. The market had capacity. It could not sell that capacity to crews who refused to sail into a zone where Iran had laid mines, announced a blockade, and was shaking down every vessel that asked to transit.

Crews had their own veto. Under collective bargaining agreements that govern most internationally crewed merchant ships, seafarers retain a contractual right to refuse transit into a designated war zone, and Hormuz clearly qualified. No insurance product, and no federal guarantee, can override a sailor’s decision that they would rather not die for a policy rider.

That is the gap the facility cannot close. The DFC structure is a bet on a problem (insufficient war risk capital) that the LMA already said did not exist.

Operation Earnest Will: What Reagan Understood

The United States has been here before. In December 1986, after more than two years of Iraqi and Iranian attacks on Gulf shipping during the Tanker War, Kuwait’s government asked the Reagan administration to escort its tankers through the Gulf. The Reagan executive branch debated the request for three months. On March 7, 1987, it agreed to reflag 11 Kuwaiti tankers as American.

What came next was not an insurance facility. It was Operation Earnest Will, the largest naval convoy operation since the Second World War.

• 14 months of continuous convoys, from July 24, 1987 to September 26, 1988.
• More than 30 US warships in the region at peak deployment, including destroyers, frigates, minesweepers, and carrier battle groups.
• Combat damage on the first day. On the opening escort mission of July 24, 1987, the reflagged supertanker Bridgeton struck an Iranian underwater mine. Its compartmentalized hull kept the damage manageable and no one was injured.
• An Iranian missile strike. On October 15, 1987, the reflagged US tanker Sea Isle City was hit by a Silkworm missile near Kuwait’s oil terminal. Seventeen crewmen and the American captain were injured.
• Retaliation that set a record. On April 14, 1988, the frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine and ten sailors were injured. Four days later, the US Navy launched Operation Praying Mantis, described by Wikipedia as “one of the US Navy’s five major surface engagements since World War II” and the largest of those five, including the Navy’s first exchange of anti-ship missiles with opposing ships and its only sinking of a major surface combatant since WWII.

The Reagan administration tried the Lloyd’s approach first. War risk premiums in the Gulf spiked during the 1984 to 1987 Tanker War, and crews and owners still refused to sail even when coverage remained available. The answer was not a reinsurance facility. The answer was a gray hull escorting each convoy with missile defenses and rules of engagement that let sailors shoot back.

That was the Carter Doctrine as a military instrument: the United States would use force to keep the Gulf open. The Trump administration is trying to convert the Carter Doctrine into a financial product. DFC instead of DESRON. Chubb instead of CENTCOM. The facility is legal, it is fast, and it is off-budget. It is also not moving tankers, because Reagan’s counterparties never ran a parallel crypto toll booth and Trump’s do.

The Math of the Backstop

Call the post-ceasefire average six vessels per day across the first two days of the truce, the clean Kpler window. The $40 billion facility is backstopping that flow.

The arithmetic is brutal. Six transits against a 130-per-day pre-war baseline works out to a flow rate of roughly 4.6% of normal. Dividing the facility’s capacity across that six-vessel daily throughput implies a notional backstop of several billion dollars in US-government-backed capacity per transiting vessel per day.

A typical oil tanker or LNG carrier has an insured hull value in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. The DFC and Chubb consortium is committing several dozen times a single hull’s value in backstop capacity for each ship that actually sails. That is not a reinsurance ratio. It is a political price tag.

The price tag also does not include Iran’s cut. At up to $2 million per transit in IRGC tolls, any vessel that actually moves under the ceasefire is potentially handing Tehran a multi-million-dollar fee in yuan and crypto, a parallel revenue stream the DFC facility does nothing to interdict, even as the scale of on-chain payments remains unconfirmed.

The Bill in Your Gas Tank

The consumer side of the insurance weapon failing is already visible in three numbers:

• Gasoline CPI: plus 21.2% month-over-month in March 2026, the largest monthly gasoline increase on record.
• Jet fuel: $2.50 to $4.88 per gallon between February 27 and April 2, a 95% increase.
• United Airlines Q2 and Q3 2026 capacity: minus 5%. CEO Scott Kirby became the first major US carrier to formally prune “tactically unprofitable” flying, citing oil prices.

Those three numbers are what the ceasefire’s first 48 hours bought at the gas pump and the boarding gate. A reinsurance facility can guarantee the hull. It cannot guarantee the barrel, and it cannot dissolve a toll booth. The barrel depends on whether the Vance, Witkoff, and Kushner delegation in Islamabad can convince Iran to drop the tolls and the mines before the two-week pause expires on or around April 22.

The underlying structural fact is that the second “pre-war” number in the Lloyd’s List data is 2,652 vessel transits in roughly the same three-week window a year ago. In 2026, between March 1 and March 25, Lloyd’s List Intelligence counted 142. That is a 95% collapse over the full wartime month, and the single cleanest number anyone can cite about what the war actually did to the world’s most important oil chokepoint.

What Happens Next

The ceasefire window is short and the insurance architecture is untested. Two outcomes matter.

One path is that the Islamabad talks produce an extension, Iran withdraws its mines, and the toll booth closes. Under that path, daily transits climb but Hormuz runs at a fraction of pre-war capacity for weeks while shipowners and crews rebuild trust. Brent stays elevated. The consumer pain stays in place. The DFC facility processes premiums, writes policies, and looks like a policy success story built on a foundation it never had to test.

The other path is a collapse of the talks, which Tehran has threatened if the wider conflict widens again. Under that path, a single tanker incident inside the facility’s coverage zone becomes a claim that lands on the DFC balance sheet. A federal guarantee that was never specifically appropriated by Congress becomes a Treasury liability. The second-order fight then stops being about oil. It becomes about whether a development finance agency has the legal authority to put the US taxpayer on the hook for marine war claims without a vote.

Reagan’s answer to the same structural problem in 1987 was to put steel in the water and hulls behind every convoy. Trump’s answer is to put paper in the market and a press release behind every announcement, while Iran runs a parallel toll collector in crypto that American insurance contracts cannot legally pay. The paper has not moved tankers for three days of ceasefire. The delegation is still in Islamabad. The 600 ships are still in the Gulf. And the 12-vessels-in-48-hours number is still the single cleanest signal that the insurance weapon, by itself, does not work.