The Central Bank of Iran (CBI) will start testing the digital rial (CBDC), expected to last at least until late 2022.
The Iranian Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture reported that the CBDC pilot is scheduled for September 22. Al Jazeera added that the digital rial will run on Borna, a distributed ledger platform built on Hyperledger Fabric’s open-source by IBM.
The CBDC is designed to ensure money programmability and increase its security. It’s also supposed to help the central government fight corruption. Representatives of the Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture emphasize that the digital rial won’t compete with global cryptocurrencies.
The Central Bank of Iran will soon announce the banks involved in the pilot program. Additionally, digital wallets for Iranian CBDC are expected to be introduced. After that, it’ll be possible to exchange physical banknotes for digital rial.
The CBDC has been a work in progress in Iran since 2018, but the process has been intensified in the last few months. The country’s government announced plans to launch a pilot program in April this year. In June, it became known about plans to speed up the process and launch the pilot program by the end of August. As a result, Iranian importers were allowed to use the cryptocurrency to pay for foreign deliveries in August, and the digital rial was ready for testing only by late September.
