On Tuesday, Venezuela launched its own cryptocurrency, Petro, to boost oil trade. This measure was devised to circumvent U.S. financial sanctions and resurrect the country’s moribund economy.
The pre-sale of the petro will be representative of crude barrel from a specific division in the country’s Orinoco oil belt. Investors were offered $60 "tokens" at discounted rates that are exchangeable for petros at the time of, what has been called as ICO, in March.
President Nicolás Maduro said in a televised launch event Tuesday night held in the country’s presidential palace with media and investors:
"Today is the day the Petro is born. We are on the world’s financial vanguard. Our response to great problems is great solutions and good will."
He further added, "The game took off successfully."
There are several analysts who think that this experiment will not succeed.
Alex Van de Sande, a Brazil-based developer for the Ethereum Foundation, said, "It honestly sounds like they don’t really understand how any of it works."
"Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it won’t raise money. We’ve seen terrible ideas that don’t make any sense raise a lot of it," he said. "If I wanted to avoid international sanctions and make money appear out of thin air in my country hiding the origin, I guess this petro would be a useful way."
Jean Paul Leidenz, an economist at Ecoanalítica, a Venezuelan financial consulting firm, said,
"The government may still get millions of fresh dollars from Russian and Arab investors. But from that to succeeding as a currency? I don’t think so."
Venezuela is undergoing deepest recession ever. The government failures are survived by the country’s citizens via cryptocurrencies. Recently, a photo have shown that children of Venezuela being fed by Bitcoin Cash (BCH). There are beliefs that the sale of token is a way for the government acquiring funds at the time of the misappropriation of tokens.
