A recent report conducted by Al Jazeera claims that Iran is looking into launching their own stablecoins in order to circumvent the current US sanctions placed on them. Reportedly the digital asset will be announced during the Electronic Banking and Payment Systems conference starting on January 29th in Tehran.
Coincidentally or intentionally if we may say, the theme for this year’s conference is “blockchain revolutions.” Al Jazeera reports:
“Iran’s cryptocurrency is expected to be rolled out in phases, first as a rial-backed digital token, to facilitate payments between Iranian banks and other Iranian institutions active in the crypto space, and later possibly as an instrument for the Iranian public to pay for local goods and services.”
Rumored to run on a private blockchain, the cryptocurrency will either be based on Ethereum, Hyper-ledger or even something currently unknown to most. Iran’s economy took a nasty hit during November 2018, when certain banks were prohibited from SWIFT, a Belgian-based worldwide messaging system that facilitates global payments.
The repercussions of being barred from utilizing SWIFT is that the country won’t be able to pay for imports or receive payments from exports. Eventually crippling the economy of the country financially as it will have to rely on other alternative means of money transfer.
Notably, the introduction of the stablecoin might not facilitate payment between Iran and other countries directly. It could least lay the groundwork that will place the country in a good position to make a switch to an alternative choice, the blockchain-based international payment system.
A similar effort was introduced by Venezuela, however, their attempt of introducing a stablecoin ‘Petro’ wasn’t received well by most. Mostly surrounded by controversies, Petro has been claimed to have plagiarised from Dash’s white paper. It will be interesting to see the world’s reaction to another national cryptocurrency.
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