Blockchain and Mutual Trust Building between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the ‎Persian Gulf Cooperation Council

Rarely found in the Persian Gulf region, are predictable behavior and ‎reliable relationships ‎being among the prerequisites for developing regions. Describing the status of Trans-Persian-‎Gulf relations under the concept of Zero Trust Security Architecture (ZTSA) and ‎concentrating on energy cooperation, this paper is to introduce an operational solution and an ‎effective mechanism to reverse the cycle of securitization of the Trans-Persian-Gulf issues. ‎The question raised here is: “why and how can Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) be ‎applied to build trust and increase certainty in the Trans-Persian-Gulf relations?” To answer ‎the why part of this question, this paper finds on the one hand the “unparalleled capabilities of ‎the blockchain trust building machine, such as providing operational transparency, traceability, ‎auditability, security, reliable and unmanipulated data, and most importantly guaranteeing the ‎implementation of prearranged agreements” and on the other hand “the need of the Islamic ‎world, the nations of the region especially Iran to implementing Endogenous Security and ‎acquiring and accumulating wealth to achieve dignity and authority” of considerable ‎importance. Appling the above technology lies also in the field of energy, and a blockchain ‎consortium, Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), can be established to manage, ‎plan and to operate a common energy project in the region with the Distributed Participation ‎of the beneficiary governments. This paper is descriptive-analytical (qualitative) and utilizes ‎abductive reasoning and individual inference power to answer the why part, and for the how ‎part, it uses deductive reasoning. This paper also concludes that the gate of Decentralized ‎Energy Cooperation (DEC) in the Persian Gulf is to be found in the shared oil and gas fields.‎