Iran’s Central Bank Completes Initial Phase of CBDC Project

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The Monetary and Banking Research Institute (MBRI), a division of the Central Bank of Iran, has announced the successful completion of the initial phase of its digital real project.

Mohammad Reza Mani Yekta, head of the Central Bank’s Office for Supervision of Payment Systems, has noted that the regulator plans to expand the scale of the CBDC experiment in the country’s payment system, but does not want to rush the implementation.

He has added that it is expected that the CBDC will be regulated similarly to the national currency and distributed to individuals and banks.

Bank Melli, Bank Mellat, and Bank Tejarat were among the 10 Iranian financial institutions that applied to participate in the project, and were the ones that took part in the pilot phase.

Recently, Iran and Russia began to discuss the possibility of creating a stablecoin connected to gold, while in August 2022, the country carried out its first import operation of $10 million paid in cryptocurrency.