Iran Developing National Blockchain Platform on IBM Hyperledger Fabric

The Central Bank of Iran, via its Informatics and Services Corporation and in conjunction with Areatak - a Tehran-based blockchain solutions provider - is developing a national blockchain project for its banking and financial sector.

Borna: Iran's public-private partnership blockchain initiativeSince 2018, Tehran has reportedly become increasingly interested in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

According to local Iranian publication Al-Monitor, the ISC and Areatak are developing numerous protocols for Borna - the proposed Iranian national blockchain platform.

The Areatak developers are currently building the platform on the Hyperledger Fabric - the IBM open-source enterprise blockchain platform.

Back in January 2019, the project team published the white paper for the Borna blockchain platform.

"[The] Borna platform has no limitation for non-financial institutes and they can use services of Borna.

"There are people in Iran who might have the mindset that they would be able to bypass the sanctions using blockchain technology and that could be the reason why a lot of people would think that we'd be trying to do the same, but in the case of Borna the reality is that the project is just meant to utilize blockchain's capabilities in the enterprise level and especially in the financial and banking industry. None of the developers, strategists, and architects working on Borna have ever worked on international payments."

"Borna platform is in no way 'a complementary infrastructure'. Instead, it provides the main standard infrastructure to create a blockchain-based financial layer for Iran's banking ecosystem. in which, key characteristics of the shared platform and its necessary modules have been foreseen. Such a platform will be executed on top of the current monetary and banking systems of Iran as a domestic solution designed to be used only and only inside the borders of Iran with respect to the required financial transparency for the people, the government of Iran, and international standards such as combating of money laundering and the financing of terrorism."

"Those narratives about bypassing sanctions are just media games. They are not about reality. How can a national infrastructure that has no connection with international parties, be able to bypass sanctions? Borna is focused on national use cases and is hosted by national organizations. Tokenization of assets or Rial in the future is limited to Borna platform transaction cases, not an international transaction."

"Experiments on the infrastructure and platform have taken place and there's no specific challenge on the technical side. But any sort of token issuance will be done by the Central Bank's order and they have the final say for the platform to actually include a digital token or not."