Why Venezuela’s cryptocurrency ‘Petro’ is mysterious? Well, after its announcement in December 2017 by the president of the country- Nicolas Maduro, the existence of the cryptocurrency has been a mystery. In the announcement, the president claimed to issue 100 million tokens. He also made the cryptocurrency Venezuela’s ‘official alternate currency.’ Soon after the announcement Joey Zhou, Ethereum core developer Tweeted a statement in which he called the ‘state-owned cryptocurrency’ a ‘blatant dash clone’ as per its whitepaper.
In December last year, the local banks of the country were ordered by the government to adopt the cryptocurrency and moreover, the Pensioners’ monthly payments started to be paid in Venezuela’s oil-backed cryptocurrency ‘Petro.’ This happened without the permission of the pensioners.
Venezuela has been trying hard to push the cryptocurrency not only within Venezuela but outside its borders too. There have been efforts for presenting the oil-backed cryptocurrency as a “unit of account for oil” to OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.)
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Last year in October when Petro was released through an ICO, a month before its launch ‘Reuters’ investigated about the oil-backed cryptocurrency. As per the reports from CCN, the investigation revealed that neither the oil reserves nor the oil-backed cryptocurrency- Petro ever existed. Although quite recently many political blogs from the country have been found to tout a ‘cryptocurrency expert named- Jose.’ This crypto expert narrated a contrasting story about the controversial cryptocurrency. After contacting him, CCN enquired if accessing a Petro wallet was possible. And whether the oil-backed crypto really works. After receiving a few tokens, CCN tested them on NEM based wallet. Petro was initially launched based on this blockchain.
Through the NEM based application, several other aspects also got unfolded. It looks that the oil-backed cryptocurrency highly resembles ‘Dash.’ Talking about the similarities, Petro too like Dash, has thirty-four characters. It also uses the upper and the lower case letters including numbers.
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CCN also managed to locate its own transaction on the ‘Petro block explorer.’ CCN’s transaction was included with 0.76 KB in the blockchain. This discovery also led to further revelations about other 5000 PTR transactions with their addresses on the blockchain. These other transactions are active and are earning tokens. However, the worth of these 5000 PTR is still not very clear because different Venezuelan entities offer a totally different rate. If we go by the country’s central bank’s rates, then one Petro is worth 36K sovereign Bolivars. Again going by the central bank’s rates, these 36000 sovereign Bolivars are worth 17.27 Dollars.
