Rumours surfaced recently that Iran could be about to reveal its state-backed cryptocurrency at the Electronic Banking and Payment Systems conference in Tehran this week.

Since November, the Middle-East country has been facing fresh sanctions from the United States and they have previously planned to use blockchain based finance tools as a way to sneak around restrictions on its economic growth.

Despite a central bank issued digital currency could be a rial-backed crypto, it was initially believed that Tehran could come up with an alternative to the worldwide settlements system, SWIFT which isn’t accessible to some Iranian banks.

At the time of writing, nothing is certain as to whether such a big scaled integration will actually occur however, there are more localised uses for the digital currency such as consumer payments which is likely an option.

A blockchain developer at the Iranian company Radfam, Yashar Rashedi said that “they certainly can't replace the likes of bitcoin due to their centralised nature, but their existence is harmless.” Following on from this, Rashedi said, “even as [CBDCs] may never find widespread everyday use among the general public, they may be able to offer some new features to startups and developers that had to work with centralised bank APIs before them.”

Iran is just one of many states that are looking to release centralised digital currencies. And on top of this, some of these are targeting the US sanctions.

Russia is also looking to release their own crypto known as the ‘crypto ruble’ however, it too is still several years away from being released. South America’s Venezuela has a digital currency, the Petro, which is already in circulation in the country but there have been many accusations to fraud and illegitimacy towards the cryptocurrency.

As reported by CoinTelegraph, “according to a signatory of the recent Chainpoint blockchain agreement between Iran, Russia and Armenia, the former is already developing a blockchain-based method to replace SWIFT.”

Head of the Russian Association of crypto industry and blockchain, Yuri Pripachkin said “According to our information, an active development of an Iranian version of SWIFT is currently underway.”

Last month, lawmakers in the United States warned that they would likewise sanction any form of the crypto-rial.

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