PETRO: $735 Million raised by Venezuela on the first 20 hours of its Cryptocurrency Pre-Sale

In the early morning of February 20, 2018, specifically at 00:00 am, the Vice President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Tarek El Aissami, announced the official launch of the first stage of Petro’s implementation, a currency legally backed by Petroleum.

This stage consists of the private pre-sale of 38,400,000 Tokens at a reference value of USD 60 (the value of oil on the international market). This would, in theory, give the country a monetary inflow of 2,304,000,000 USD.

In this context, opinions have not taken long to appear from those who rely on the currency, those who support the convenience of tokenizing an oil futures contract and those who expect the currency to fail because they distrust the Socialist-oriented Government (with one of the biggest corruption perceptions index according to international studies).

The United States had previously frozen the country’s ability to conduct monetary transactions through U. S. banks, which was one of the causes that motivated Venezuela to seek decentralization as a way out of the power of the United States and other centralizing agencies to directly or indirectly determine the country’s policies.

The existence of Petro (if successful) could represent a bypass to U. S. sanctions on Venezuelan politics, which could mean a precedent for other countries to follow, leaving Third Parties without the possibility of diplomatic and/or economic interference and practically reducing their pressure on the military and commercial sphere.

To avoid this, the United States had already issued a series of declarations warning investors that if they were to buy such tokens against the will of the United States, they would have to do so at their own risk, facing the possible consequences of conflicting with their official interests.

However, the Venezuelan government had mentioned that given the condition of anonymity and convenience involved in the use of a cryptocurrency, it could attract investors from European countries, as well as Turkey, Qatar and even the United States itself.

In the midst of this atmosphere of contradictory declarations, this morning, after the announcement, the official Petro website was updated, with a banner announcing its pre-sale. Links were also published so that interested investors could register, as well as a series of documents that would allow them to learn more about this Process: A buyer’s manual, and an Anti-Money Laundry Compliance manual (both documents, for now, available in Spanish).