President of Iran Hassan Rouhani attends a meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council in Yerevan, Armenia on 1 October 2019. Asatur Yesayants/Shutterstock
Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, has ordered the government and the country’s central bank to devise a new national strategy for cryptocurrency mining, local news site ArzDigital reported on 22 May.
According to the publication, Rouhani told officials from the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) and the Ministries of Energy, Communications and Information Technology, that they needed draft plans for a national cryptocurrency mining strategy, including regulation and mining revenue. The briefing happened during the 137th session of the country’s economic coordination headquarters, a seminar for the national economic strategy, which was chaired by President Rouhani.
Rouhani’s orders come only days after the Iranian parliament proposed a bill to include cryptocurrencies into its strict foreign exchange and currency smuggling regulations. If passed into law, the bill will also make existing crypto exchanges, licensed by the CBI, follow the country’s foreign currency exchange guidelines.
Although it remains unknown why Rouhani wishes to revisit Iran’s mining regulations, the country already has a 4% share in Bitcoin’s total hashrate. Iran was one of the first countries to officially recognize crypto mining as an industrial activity back in July 2019. As previously reported, the Iranian government had already issued over 1,000 crypto mining licenses in its first six months.
Last year, Rouhani argued that creating an alternative currency, such as a Muslim cryptocurrency, was one way to fight the economic dominance of the United States. At the time he said that U.S. economic sanctions are the “main tools of domineering hegemony and bullying” of other nations.