Tehran hosted the eighth annual conference on Electronic Banking and Payment Systems, that was promoted by the financial and Banking analysis establishment, the analysis arm of the financial organization of Islamic Republic of Iran (CBI). Among the declared topics beneath the theme of the Blockchain Revolution, it had been the disclosing of the Iranian set up for a national digital currency that, as a matter of truth, remained rather obscure once it had been bestowed throughout the conference.
In fact, blockchain appears to be an exhilarating topic for Iran: Before the top of the meeting, four Iranian banks declared that they need to be developed a gold-backed cryptocurrency referred to as PayMon, going to tokenize a part of their reserves.
In his inaugural speech, Ali Divandari the director of the financial and Banking analysis establishment stressed that “the realities of blockchain technology ought to be accepted.” Also, several contributions from Iranian and foreign specialists targeted on the opportunities that fintech and blockchain might probably open for the Iranian money and industry.
Besides, forthwith once the conference, CBI explicit its overall approach, pro to acknowledge and to authorize cryptocurrencies, ICOs, exchanges and mining. However, within the meantime, the financial organization reiterated that mistreatment cryptocurrencies as ways of payment within the country remain prohibited. Therefore, the road map toward a national digital currency and also the future regulation of cryptocurrencies within the country stay unsure.
Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi, the minister of communications and data technology, on the opposite hand, stressed a number of the problems that would arise in a very method still managed by the state’s central government:
Blockchain’s essence is localized and distributed. However, the central bank financial establishment|financial organization is that the centralized institution for regulation banking, thus blockchain is structurally in conflict with the financial organization.
Iran’s Clerics Challenge Crypto Legitimacy
In January 2018, Seyyed Abas Mousavian, a member of the central bank’s Muslim Jurisprudence Council, expressed doubts regarding “sharp fluctuations” and a “lack of transparency in cryptocurrencies. By April, his doubts had become a finding of fact against crypto assets, criticized as “not halal” as a result of they’re not supported any real plus and since “they cause devoted and believer society’s wealth goes to unbelievers pocket, paving the trail for his or her dominance within the society.
In January 2019, the new headquarters of the eighth annual conference on Electronic Banking and Payment Systems quoted the most recent authoritative statements by Mousavian:
“I do not consider Bitcoin as money. Because money must have the consistency to be able to value other assets based on it. An item whose value is shifted 19 times over the course of one year indicates that the nature of this so-called money is not capable of being used as a benchmark for measuring assets. I sometimes call it mysterious money. It’s coded, and mysterious at the same time because its dimensions are not known.”
