Venezuelan Petro Finally Officially Launched

Venezuela has finally officially launched its cryptocurrency called El Petro. According to the country’s President Nicolas Maduro, the Petro is the first ever cryptocurrency that is state backed and mineral-reserves-backed.

The Creation of El Petro

In the last year, President Maduro has been claiming that he had a new plan for his country’s economic recovery. This plan included pushing up the price of gasoline for the first time in more than 20 years.

Additionally, with this plan, Maduro stated that he was going to ease the massive economic crisis his country has been facing by first devaluing the country’s fiat currency and replacing it with a new one – the new Bolivar – and then anchoring that currency to a cryptocurrency which he named El Petro.

As a part of this grand plan, the pre-sale of the new state-backed, mineral-backed cryptocurrency was launched in February 2018. At the time of its pre-sale launch, Maduro announced that each Petro was backed by a barrel of Venezuela’s reportedly 5 billion barrels of oil reserves, as well as natural gas, diamonds and gold.

Last week, President Maduro announced that the official sale of the Petro would begin on November 5.

According to Maduro, the Petro is already strengthening his economic recovery plan. He also stated that this new cryptocurrency was going to “revolutionize” the worldwide cryptocurrency economy.

Courting Controversy

Since the time that the creation of the Petro was announced, the cryptocurrency has been at the center of controversy.

First, just a few months after the announcement of its creation, US President Donald Trump issued a mandate that all dealings with any kind of digital currency, token or coin being issued by the Venezuelan government was prohibited for all US citizens.

Then, Reuters conducted an in-depth research to verify the claims made by the Venezuelan president and found that there were no signs of the 5 billion barrels of crude oil that Maduro claimed were backing the Petro. In fact, most experts and analysts don’t believe that the Venezuelan crypto is actually backed by the minerals as claimed.

Now, just before launching the public sale of the cryptocurrency, Maduro has mandated that Venezuelans can only pay passport fees with Petro. Maduro also stated that passports would now be more expensive, with a new passport costing 2 Petros and the renewal of an old passport will cost 1 Petro. This means that the majority of Venezuelans can longer afford to get a passport, since the average monthly minimum wages are one quarter that price.

And finally, there are accusations that the developers of the crypto simply copied the white paper of the crypto Dash.