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On February 20, 2018, the Venezuelan government launched the cryptocurrency called Petro, whose symbol is PTR, and this opened a possibility for the development of crypto assets in the country.
This currency according to President Nicolás Maduro is backed by state assets represented by reserves of various natural resources such as oil, gold, diamond and gas and backed by a barrel of oil from the Venezuelan crude oil basket.
At the time and still remains the fact that it cannot be considered a cryptocurrency because it does not comply with the fact of being decentralized, however after 3 years of its appearance the expectations about it have been diluted for the bulk of people, since at the beginning it was hoped that it would boost the cost of the bolivar or that it would be easily available to a large number of people.
The Petro can be considered an elite or government-only token, as it can only be traded through government-linked exchanges and it is not easy for someone who wants to trade or simply buy and sell it to make transactions.
On the other hand it cannot be mined, only the state can do it, the justification is that the price of it is maintained.
Experts in the field agree that the coin does not belong to the crypto ecosystem and that it does not meet certain legal parameters such as the transparency of a white paper, and that changes have been made to the technological foundations without any notice.
As if that were not enough, the Chilean exchange agency Latin American Money, after some investigations, concluded that it is used for money laundering.
The truth of the matter is that the Petro is a ghost that is there but most people do not see it, that it is managed at the whim of the government and its value is not clear because if it is a barrel of oil, it should fluctuate with the price of oil but it does not.
A few years ago the president announced the anchoring of the minimum wage to the Petro, something that never really happened, as they conveniently invented a different value for the currency, the same one they gave when they gave away half a Petro to retirees to save.
Someone said that the Petro was a chocolate coin but in reality it is something worse than that, it is an instrument that increases inflation since the money that can enter the state through it does not pass a comptroller's examination and there is no instrument to supervise it.