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Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Hash on Coin Desk TV.

We are here to have some fun with you on a Wednesday.

I'm Jen Sanasi.

We got Christy Harkin and Adam B. Levine on the show this morning.

Adam, I know you never start us off with a fun story, but here we go. You're here solely for the

news, and I appreciate that. I don't know. I actually think this one's kind of a fun story.

So today we're kicking things off with an interesting development in the world of central bank digital currencies, better known as CBDCs.

According to the Iranian Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines, and Agriculture, the sanctioned nation of Iran will be launching a pilot project behind a so-called crypto real starting tomorrow.

According to news first published on

the 12th of this month, the central bank says the project is intended for use in micropayments

to improve financial inclusion to add programmability to the national currency with the intention

of essentially creating a nationally operated stable coin you can think of as opposed to

creating something fully decentralized in the token vein, kind of like Bitcoin.

And it's not mentioned in this article, but it does seem obvious, I guess, to anyone paying attention, that Iran would very much like to trade with partners using a token like this,

since they still do have trading partners in Europe, who they do business with, but who, as a

result of being locked out of the U.S.-led financial system, have had to resort to doing things like literally shipping gold

and other stuff like that,

which is a lot less efficient than using something like this.

...