Iran’s customs administration has not issued licenses for importing digital currency mining equipment into the country due to the absence of approval from the government.
Deputy
President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Customs Administration
(IRICA) Jamal Arounaghi said that the agency has not issued any licenses
for importing cryptocurrency mining devices into the country, multilingual Tehran-based news outlet Mehr News Agency reported on July 21.
While
cryptocurrency mining equipment is banned in the country, IRICA has
determined a tariff rate for its import, defining it as related to the
computers and central processors. Arounaghi noted that the presence of a
tariff rate does not indicate than an item is legal or approved by the
state, saying that the IRICA has tariff schemes for some illegal drugs
as an example.
The minister said that if the government authorizes import of crypto miners, IRICA will develop related directives.
Earlier in July, Cointelegraph reported that Iranian authorities are wrestling with the rising number of citizens turning to Bitcoin (BTC) mining and use as a means of coping with a sanctions-crippled economy.
At
the time, Iran’s Minister for Information and Communications
Technology, Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi said that the country has
become “a heaven for miners,” adding:
“The business of
‘mining’ is not forbidden in law but the government and the Central
Bank have ordered the Customs Bureau to ban the import of [mining
machines] until new regulations are introduced.”
In a recent report, the American Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) assessed the current and future risks of cryptocurrency use by countries adversarial to the United States, including Iran.
The
FDD warned that, in a scenario in which one of the countries convinces
other nations to use a state-based cryptocurrency based on a major
commodity export — such as oil — sanctions would be much harder to
enforce.
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