The Central Bank of Iran (CBI) plans to roll out a digital currency pilot phase soon. According to a top CBI official, the digital currency will benefit the country by helping to resolve financial inconsistencies and bring decentralization. Iran has been working on the digital currency since 2018.
According to a report from the Iranian Labour News Agency, the Central Bank of Iran will roll out the country’s cryptocurrency for testing shortly. Mehran Moharamian, the CBI’s vice governor for IT affairs disclosed this according to the report. Moharamian adds that the CBI considers the launch necessary as cryptocurrencies are a solution for resolving inconsistencies and decentralizing resources.
Iran’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) will be called the digital Rial and will be pegged to Rial, the country’s currency. Development on it began in 2018 after the Informatics Services Corporation (ISC), the executive arm of the Central Bank of Iran in charge of operating the country’s banking automation and payment services network, was tasked with developing a national cryptocurrency. At the time, the CEO of ISC, Seyyed Abotaleb Najafi, said the digital Rial will first be tested with commercial banks.
…in the first phase the blockchain banking infrastructure will be granted to Iranian commercial banks to use it as a token and payment instrument in transactions and banking settlement, he stated.
So far, the CBDC has been developed using the open-source Hyperledger Fabric technology, the blockchain framework initially developed by IBM and Digital Asset, a New York-based industry startup. The Hyperledger Fabric is now code hosted by the Linux Foundation, which also leads the Hyperledger blockchain consortium.
