Is Iran a Russian proving ground for testing national cryptocurrency idea?

The whole situation about Iranian cryptocurrency is very exciting as it sets the new level of adoption of the cryptocurrency in general. This is not the first case when a country issues digital currency, but it seems that Venezuelan Petro failed and PayMan can become the first one to succeed.

Donald Trump imposed sanctions on Iran and SWIFT removed all Iranian banks from its system, so the usual banking transactions became impossible. In the middle of 2018, when the situation was still in development, the first steps of switching to the trade in crypto had been already made - Iran negotiated such possibilities with Russia - yet another country under sanctions.

By that time, Russia had already prepared MIR cards based on NSPK payment system to replace VISA in case of being disconnected from the latter. Was that system a success? Started in 2015, it currently has only 321 banks in it, according to the official data. This number is close to the number of banks that use the Ripple network, so, it might be considered as a big fail for the country that had around 900 banks in 2014.

Russia itself was considering the possibility of using the cryptocurrency as means of payment but the USA is not increasing the severity of sanctions against Russia and the whole idea is currently "set on hold". There were rumours that Russia helped Venezuela with Petro, but there's no confirmation.

Now we can see that European Countries are interested in keeping the trade with Iran alive and were offered to switch to crypto. Russia is supporting this initiative as well. In fact, as it was mentioned earlier, the whole idea started to develop since Russia agreed to support Iran.

Currently, it seems that Russia has no strong reason for switching to cryptocurrency but considers it as an option and simply supports different countries that are forced to test such an alternative to the current banking system.

It's really hard to say if such a scenario is true but it definitely increases noise around cryptocurrency itself. Will the tiny Iranian boat, called "PayMan" survive the storm? Please share your opinion.