SWIFT bans Iran. Iran speeds up crypto-rial
With the U.S. sanctions hanging over Iran, SWIFT has officially ousted the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) from its financial system. In its turn, the Iranian government has expedited the launch of their own cryptocurrency, backed by rial.
According to the developer, Informatics Services Corporation (ISC), the cryptocurrency itself has been already created and is currently in its pilot stage of initial testing. Seyyed Abotaleb Najafi, CEO of the company, went further and assured that “crypto-rial” would actually eliminate the need to use such financial settlement organizations as SWIFT.
According to Najafi, the Iranian state-backed crypto will be used in a one-to-one framework for transferring value without intermediaries. He also pointed out that the idea of the crypto-rial goes far beyond simply the U.S. sanctions. Najafi is confident that the Iranian cryptocurrency will help to re-build the whole financial system of the Iranian government both on the internal and external level.
However, launching a successful cryptocurrency is not a definite “recipe for success.” In fact, the only real change would come for Iran only in case other countries would accept deals in crypto-rial. As of now, for the rest of the world, it’s still counted according to the dollar reserves of Iran. Weather crypto-real will become a real game changer, or just a disgrace (as it happened with Venezuela state-backed Petro) only remains to be seen. Stay tuned for updates!