- Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announces plans for a digital currency release or cryptocurrency titled petro. The initial sale of petro will begin on 20 February.
A number of miners were trained in educational institutions after signing a white paper draft or an official report from the government. It disputes the initial draft that plans to mine a pre-mining petro. This means that petro is mined first before it is officially launched to the public.
Venezuela is in crisis due to sanctions on economic embargoes that result in high inflation in the oil-rich country. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts there will be an increase in inflation in Venezuela by 13,000 percent by the end of this year.
The launch of petro disclosed Maduro is in a timely manner.
- "Now is the right time to accelerate the entry of petro, to be sure of what we have created in the intellectual and technological capacities that our country possesses", explains Maduro.
He explains that petro will have a major impact on accessing foreign currency in the world to obtain goods and services from various countries to meet the needs of the Venezuelan people.
- This policy is not fully supported by the Venezuelan political elite. Summarized KompasTekno from Bloomberg, Friday (2/2/2018), the government's opposition assumes that petro is not a financial tool or a tool to avoid economic sanctions.
"This (petro) is not cryptocurrency, it is just a forward sale for Venezuelan oil," explained Venezuelan legislator Jorge Millan.
Forward sale is a concept of buying and selling that is done in the future but with current prices, simply like buying before harvesting. One petro coin is rewarded with a barrel of crude oil, but can not be exchanged for processed minerals that cost much more.
Venezuela is exploring plans to embed petro into the "card of the fatherland". This card is the identity card used to claim government subsidies