The digital rial is expected to be distributed among users and financial institutions in the country for widespread usage.
More and more nations around the globe move closer to launching CBDCs with every passing day, and Iran joins their ranks by recently completing the pre-pilot stage of the Iranian central bank digital currency. A basic exploration and research regarding a potential digital rial is now complete, as an official statement from the Monetary and Banking Research Institute (MBRI) of CBI suggests.
Reportedly, the Central Bank of Iran is accelerating its CBDC development as the Bank of Russia’s governor Elvira Nabiullina is scheduled to visit the country soon
The head of the CBI in terms of supervising any payment systems, Mohammad Reza Mani Yekta, shared the aforementioned updates at the ninth annual conference on electronic banking and payment systems hosted near the end of February, 2023. As he stated, the Central Bank of Iran has plans to magnify the usage of the digital rial in the nationwide payment system; however, the authorities don’t wish to rush the integration of the Iranian CBDC.
Mani Yekta further noted that the rules for regulating the potential digital rial will be the same as those the rial banknotes abide by. The infrastructure for the CBDC will have the features of a digital distributed ledger like a blockchain, and the digital rial would be shared to both individual users and financial institutions like banks.
So far, around ten banks in the country have shown interest in joining the digital rial project, among them are prominent names like Bank Melli, Bank Mellat, and Bank Tejarat- who were all involved in the pre-pilot phase trials. Further, all banks and credit organizations in Iran are anticipated to start offering digital wallets for efficient usage of the digital rial.
According to Mani Yekta’s statement, “The pre-pilot phase ended successfully with valuable achievements. The project will soon be launched in other ecosystems and will be used by more users.”