Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro announced on 1oct 2018, the official launch of the PETRO, supposedly an oil-backed cryptocurrency created in February. In a televised address,
Maduro said:
“Venezuela makes history! Today we take a step forward with the launch of petro as a national currency and platform for strengthening our financial sovereignty”.
The launch of the so-called "cryptocurrency" comes as Venezuela faces deepening economic and political crises.
According to the government, the petro is backed
by oil, gas, gold and diamonds, and is meant to help overcome US and EU
sanctions.
"Petro is born, and we are going to have a total success for the welfare of Venezuela," President Nicolas Maduro.
What is the petro?
- The idea for the
petro came from Hugo Chavez, who had foreseen a "strong currency
backed by raw materials", according to the government's white paper
on the petro.
- Announced in
December 2017, the petro is intended to supplement Venezuela's bolivar
fuerte (VEF) currency and help overcome US sanctions.
- Petros will be
"pre-mined", meaning the government would produce and
control it.
- Venezuela has
allocated five billion barrels of oil to back its new digital
currency, which will be tied to the cost of a barrel of Venezuelan oil
History of PETRO Coin:
Venezuelan President Nicolas Madura announced the petro in a televised address on 3
December 2017, stating that it would be backed by Venezuela's reserves of oil, gas oline,gold and diamond. On January 5,
2018, Maduro announced that Venezuela would issue 100 million tokens of the
petro, which would put the value of the entire issuance at just over $6 billion. It
also established a cryptocurrency government advisory group called VIBE to act
as "an institutional, political and legal base" from which to launch
the petro. Carlos Vargas is the "Superintendent of
Cryptocurrencies".
The
petro’s pre-sale started on February 20 at -04:00 UTC and ended on March 19 at
-04:00 UTC. 38.4 million tokens were made available. The
government stated the pre-sale raised US $3.3 billion,though according to Steve Hanke no
independent audits were made to verify this claim.The white paper of petro
initially stated that the currency would be on theEthereum platform,
though later on the launch date the white paper was changed and the platform
was to be with NEM.
According to wikipedia...........
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