An Iranian commander calls for crypto use to evade sanctions – report

Saeed Muhammad, commander of Khatam-al Anbiya Construction, an engineering firm controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of the Iranian Armed Forces, has reportedly called for the use of cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions.

"We are demanding a more sophisticated mechanism to circumvent sanctions, and we are calling for the activation of the use of cryptocurrencies, and we want bilateral or multilateral monetary agreements," said Mohammed, according to a report from Iranian Labour News Agency (ILNA) last week.

Iran has been a target of U.S. sanctions since 1979. In recent years, several Iranian authorities have proposed the use of crypto to bypass those sanctions.

Most recently, Iran's President Hassan Rouhani suggested creating a cryptocurrency for use in trade among Muslim countries as an alternative to the U.S. dollar. Rouhani said at the time that the U.S. has used economic sanctions as the "main tools of domineering hegemony and bullying" other nations.

"Bitcoin cannot be sanctioned by anyone," an Iranian crypto expert Ziya Sadr, who has discussed bitcoin with local government officials, told The New York Times last year. "Not by the U.S. government or any other government or other financial entities."