The governor of Iran’s Central Bank announced on Sunday that the country’s cryptocurrency will be piloted in the near future, but gave no other specifics.
Ali Salehabadi told reporters on the sidelines of his first meeting with members of the parliament that central bankers are actively analyzing the risks and rewards.
“Once the Money and Credit Council authorizes it, the pilot trial will begin,” he said, according to IRIB News.
The governor and lawmakers of the CBI did not just talk about the national cryptocurrency during their Sunday meeting.
Central Bank law overhaul
They also decided to form a joint commission as quickly as possible to finalize the long-awaited plan to overhaul the country’s central bank law.
The “national cryptocurrency,” which may be in line with past ideas for the formation of a national cryptocurrency, was not elaborated on by the top banker.
The Iranian Central Bank’s Informatics Services Corporation, which is in charge of the country’s banking automation and payment services network, was entrusted with designing a national cryptocurrency in 2018.
Officials from the business later revealed that the Iranian cryptocurrency was built on the Hyperledger Fabric technology.
The Hyperledger Fabric platform is a blockchain framework implementation that is hosted by the Linux Foundation and is one of the Hyperledger Company’s projects.
Unlike popular cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, which were established on public blockchains, the national cryptocurrency was developed on a private blockchain, which means it cannot be mined by the general public.
The ‘crypto-rial’ currency
Despite this, there have been no significant modifications to the project. Instead, central bankers recently declared that they were working on a plan to issue a “crypto-rial” as a digital currency issued by the central bank.
The crypto-rial, according to CBI officials, is a digital form of money that will be disseminated by the central bank rather than a cryptocurrency that might be used for minor cashless transactions.
Iran’s Parliament’s research arm has frequently urged a number of decision-making organizations, including the central bank, to band together and use the potential of digital money and blockchain technologies to develop legislation that assists the country to avoid U.S. sanctions while also boosting the economy.
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