Problems in Venezuela
Venezuela has been going through a hyperinflation crisis, during this time many Venezuelans adopted Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a means to store their value and circumvent the economic crisis. The socialist government thought this was a pretty good idea and decided to launch its own crypto in 2018.
The Petro (PTR) is a cryptocurrency created by the government which supposedly had its value backed by the nation’s many oil and mineral reserves. This would supplement the decline of the Bolivar Fuerte (the national currency).
Petro Adoption in Venezuela
Another strange occurrence happened in 2020 when President Nicolas Maduro decreed it mandatory to pay with PTR for government documents services, and oddly, airplane flights.
100 million PTR tokens would be issued on its own blockchain. Which reportedly made the whole issuance worth $6 billion or so at the time of issuance. Well, it wasn’t long before a series of odd events resulted in constant rapid fiscal policy changes over the next few years. The struggling government would also announce gold backed Petro Gold, and this would launch a day after the Petro.
Things Don’t Add Up
Petro Gold launched its pre-sale with 38.4 million tokens available, the government stated that it had raised $3.3 billion, a claim of which was quickly shot down as there were no independent audits to verify the claim. Speaking of verification, there was zero proof that PTR was actually backed by anything tangible at all. Furthermore, the technology leveraged was a clone of Dash, a popular cryptocurrency, which also questions the claim that PTR has its own unique blockchain.
Things worsened in Venezuela and despite the best efforts to implement two cryptocurrencies, the government couldn’t balance the damage done by their socialist policies. The government quickly launched another currency reform and replaced the Bolivar Fuerte with the Bolivar Soberano, which under the nations fixed exchange rate to the U.S. dollar, devalued the new fiat currency, which also had a fixed exchange rate with PTR.
It was later confirmed that registered offices of Petro, and the promoted website didn’t exist, just like the oil and mineral reserves that supposedly gave PTR any value at all. Venezuela’s economy is still in extremely deep trouble and the citizens are struggling to maintain basic daily activities such as buying food.
