The people of Iran have seen the value of their currency drop significantly in the wake of the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, following the withdrawal of the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018.
This week an Iranian general called for a unique way to bypass the sanctions on his country enforced by the United States.
Saeed Muhammad, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, called for Iran to use cryptocurrencies to evade the economic sanctions.
According to the Telegram channel of Coinit.ir, a crypto news organization based in Iran, the general addressed a crowd on Feb. 26 (translated from Farsi):
«We are demanding the creation of a more sophisticated mechanism to bypass sanctions. To circumvent sanctions, we must develop solutions such as the exchange of products and the use of cryptocurrencies with our partnerships in other countries.»
Sanctions’ economic impact on Iranian citizens
Sanctions have effectively isolated Iran from foreign trade and investment and the use of cryptocurrencies has been on the rise ever since as a way to circumvent them. Bitcoin has been described in interviews as one of the only ways to get money in and out of the country.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s administration announced it would launch a national cryptocurrency back in 2018. More recently, Iran’s Ministry of Industries, Mining and Trade issued more than 1,000 cryptocurrency mining licenses to domestic operations.
Earler this week the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force added Iran to a blacklist of countries not complying with anti-terrorism financing requirements.
CoinMarketCap CEO Hosts ‘Live’ AMA on Twitter — With No Video
Crypto data site CoinMarketCap hosted a “live” ask me anything, or AMA, session on Twitter with company CEO and founder Brandon Chez — but the session only included Chez on Twitter standby posting comments, not on video.
“I do value my privacy, but am not completely opposed to trying more of a live format in the future”, Chez said in a tweet when asked if the AMA format was for anonymity or privacy purposes. “We’ll see how this AMA goes”, he added.
Chez appears quite private
The AMA’s format lines up with Chez’s reputation as someone who prefers to lay low, labeled as CoinMarketCap’s “mysterious” founder in a recent blog post from the company.
Many references and profiles for Chez on various sites also include no pictures of the CoinMarketCap, or CMC, founder. Chez ranks 25th in Cointelegraph’s top 100 most influential people in crypto and blockchain.
The founder answers the public’s questions
As one of the largest crypto data sites in the industry, it makes sense that CMC would be a target for hackers. The company has not faced much in this department though, according to Chez.
“CMC been DDoS’d several times in the early days but I’m happy to say that we’ve never been hacked”, Chez said, referring to distributed denial-of-service attacks — a type of attack which leaves users without website or network access.
A Twitter user also brought up the topic of fake volume numbers on CMC, as research data revealed in 2019. “We’ve released a new metric to give a more accurate picture of activity on exchanges”, Chez said, pointing to a blog post with further information.
As for how Chez got into crypto, the CMC founder noted he stumbled on an article about Bitcoin in 2011 when the asset hit $1, and has been involved since then.
Several months ago, Cointelegraph also reported on CMC adding a liquidity metric to its data sets.
