There were reports late last year that indicated the level of interest the Iranian government had on bitcoin as a means of eluding economic sanctions.
However, Iran has come out and said that that is not the case.
In a report that came out on the Iranian site, Iran Front Page, the country’s central bank has categorically denied recognizing bitcoin as an official currency as well as the idea that it was facilitating bitcoin transactions.
“The wild fluctuations of the digital currencies along with competitive business activities underway via network marketing and pyramid scheme [tactics] have made the market of these currencies highly unreliable and risky,” the central bank was quoted as saying.
According to the report, the central bank also remarked that it was developing a mechanism to “control and prevent digital currencies in Iran.”
However, there’s an intriguing element in the said report: Iran’s technology minister recently announced that the government is working on a homegrown cryptocurrency.
If this is indeed the case, Iran would not be the first nation to develop its own virtual currency as a way of bypassing financial blockades. Earlier in the week, Venezuela launched a new cryptocurrency called the petro, which is supposedly backed by the South American country’s oil reserves.
Although sanctions on Iran are not as severe as they used to be before the 2015 nuclear deal with the West, Iran is still relatively cut off from most international payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard, and services such as PayPal.
That has reportedly made bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies appealing to Iranians, if not their government.
