As per Iran’s media report, the Islamic Parliament of Iran is seeking to tighten crypto exchanges, seeking to enforce the existing traditional sector regulations on them. While this sounds to have a regulatory clarity, it might also cripple the surging demand of cryptocurrency in the country. 

With new bills, the Iranian parliament is eying to include cryptocurrency in the country’s existing “currency smuggling and foreign currency exchange regulations”. Although they have only proposed the bill and have not been passed yet, if it does, the country’s exchange must be licensed by the Central Bank of Iran. Moreover, the exchanges must also follow legacy foreign currency exchange guidelines. It’s worth noting that nothing concrete has been made public as to how and from when the crypto trading platforms should follow the norms of the traditional financial sector. 

Iran is a home for multiple crypto exchanges which are legally based in other countries. Any violation of the proposed law would mean that the founders or team will be put in jail or impose hefty charges. Some of the popular cryptocurrency exchanges in Iran are Cryptoland and LocalBitcoins Iran. Noticeably, the former crypto exchange has been on top bulletins after Tron founder, Justin Sun had an AMA session with Cryptoland on May 17. 

As a way to regulate the industry, Iran has issued more than 1000 licenses for crypto mining farms in January this year. More so, in February this year, Parliament of Iran were eyeing at these licensed crypto mining farms as a source of new tax revenue. In fact, it is estimated the country can obtain over $1 billion in annual revenue from these crypto mining farms.