According to a September survey from Gate Trade, crypto has been one of the most popular investments among Iranians. More than a third of 1,650 Iranian investors surveyed earned from $500 to $3,000 by mining, while 58 percent earned income through trading.
Iran has been hit with severe economic sanctions by the U.S. that limit how the nation’s financial institutions make investments abroad since the dollar is the most common currency in international transactions.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says the Muslim world needs its own cryptocurrency to fight American economic domination in international trade and cut reliance on the dollar, AP reported.
“The Muslim world should be designing measures to save themselves from the domination of the United States dollar and the American financial regime,» he said at the Kuala Lumpur Summit in Malaysia on Thursday.
The Iranian government has been working on expanding the use of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin to circumvent the U.S. sanctions.
Most of the bitcoin holders are long-term investors who intend to hold the cryptocurrency for more than one year, according to the survey.
At the summit, Rouhani also urged Muslim countries to set up a system to encourage trading in local currencies as well as to create preferential trade policies to strengthen linkage, according to the report.
Iranian General Advocates Crypto Use for Skirting Sanctions
An Iranian general is reportedly calling for the use of cryptocurrency to evade sanctions.
Saeed Muhammad, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ «Army of Guardians of the Islamic Revolution» (or Sepâh for short), a branch of the Iranian Armed Forces, said in a speech Wednesday that Iran should look to cryptocurrencies to bolster international investment despite heavy sanctions on the nation, reported Coinit.ir.
«We are demanding the creation of a more sophisticated mechanism (a commodities exchange) to bypass sanctions,» he said. «To circumvent sanctions, we must develop solutions such as the exchange of products and the use of cryptocurrencies with our partnerships in other countries.»
The news was first shared by Coinit.ir, a Farsi-language crypto news organization, on Telegram Wednesday. (Telegram is a popular app for sharing information in Iran, with Bloomberg describing it as «one of the most influential messaging platforms in the Middle East.»)
Iran has long been a target of U.S. sanctions, with leaders and other residents being placed under individual sanctions through the U.S. Treasury Department Office of Foreign Asset Control’s «Specially-Designated Nationals» list. Sanctions are designed to isolate a nation from the global financial system, preventing international entities from investing in local projects or letting sanctioned nations easily trade with global partners.
More recently, the Financial Action Task Force, the intergovernmental body which creates standards for combating financial crime worldwide, added Iran to its own blacklist due to alleged non-compliance with anti-terrorism financing requirements.
Iran has been laying the groundwork for a broader use of cryptocurrencies. The national government had previously been working with blockchain startups to update its financial infrastructure, with private banks backing some projects and the central government going so far as to provide funding for at least one company.
Speculation that Iran would formally try to evade sanctions using cryptocurrency has long been rampant, but at least one source told CoinDesk in February 2019 that it would be «too suspicious» for the central bank to actually go ahead with any project in that area.
