The “petro” was announced by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a televised address at the end of 2017, just as the investor craze for initial coin offerings (ICOs) was peaking. Backed by Venezuela's oil reserves, the state-issued cryptocurrency was explicitly devised to bypass US and EU sanctions and bolster a struggling regime.

It would do this by quickly raising much needed capital from foreign investors, and potentially establishing a means of payment that could sidestep the international financial system that enforces those sanctions.

The issuance and sale of the Venezuelan petro mirrored the model used to great effect by many ICOs. In January 2018, the government announced that it would issue 100 million tokens of the petro, each being valued at around $60. An initial batch of tokens were to be made available through a “public presale”, whereby members of the public could register on a government website to purchase petros using Russian Rubles or cryptocurrencies such as bitcoins.

On the very first day of the presale, Maduro claimed that the petro had raised $735 million from 87,200 investors across 127 countries. By the time it ended, figures from the official website stated that some $5 billion had been raised.

Where are the Petro Tokens?

Despite impressive claims made by the Venezuelan government about the success of the petro, it remains unclear whether any money was raised or whether the crypto token actually exists at all. There is no clear evidence that anyone successfully purchased any petros through the buggy presale website - the purchase process often stymied by unexplained errors or email confirmations that never arrived.

The confusion around the issuance of the petro was seized upon by scammers who set up websites and twitter accounts and purported to be agents of the Venezuelan government. These were used to trick unsuspecting investors into purchasing fake petro tokens with cryptocurrencies.

Even if some of the tokens were successfully issued and sold, where are they? The scheme’s confusing and self-contradictory white paper variously describes the petro as being issued on the Ethereum blockchain, the NEM blockchain and its own dedicated blockchain. There has been no confirmation from the Venezuelan government that this is the case. A number of tokens have appeared on the Ethereum and NEM blockchains, named “petro” or variants thereof. However, anyone can create such tokens on these public blockchains and the Venezuelan government has not confirmed that any of them actually correspond to the petro.

In addition, none of the many cryptocurrency exchanges around the world (including in Venezuela) appear to have listed the petro - an unlikely situation if billions of dollars worth of the token are in the hands of investors keen to trade them.

State-backed Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain Transparency & Maintaining Sanctions

Fast forward to August 2018: Venezuela is facing inflation of close to one million percent, and the government has announced the replacement of the bolivar fuerte with a new currency - the bolívar soberano. As well as being devalued by 95% compared to the old currency, the value of the bolivar soberano is now pegged to the petro. This petro-backing of the national currency has been described as a “smokescreen”: an attempt to dazzle the public with blockchain technology and distract attention from yet another disastrous currency devaluation.

While the petro has resulted in what looks more like a poorly-implemented scam than a sophisticated attempt to bypass international sanctions, it is nevertheless a significant milestone for crypto-assets. The use of decentralized, blockchain-based assets by a nation state to bypass economic controls is a model being closely examined by other countries subject to sanctions. Russia and Iran are reported to be developing state-backed cryptocurrencies and Russian involvement in the petro scheme has been claimed, with Vladimir Putin himself said to have been personally involved.

In response to the petro, President Trump issued an executive order prohibiting transactions in any Venezuelan government-issued cryptocurrency by a United States person or within the United States. OFAC has clarified that US persons have the same sanctions compliance obligations regardless of whether transactions involve fiat currencies or cryptocurrencies, and has announced that cryptocurrency addresses are set to be added to the Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons List (SDN).

The transparent nature of the blockchains on which these crypto-assets are transferred means that governments and financial institutions can still do much to ensure that sanctions are maintained. Cryptocurrency exchanges in the US and elsewhere can act as gatekeepers to the mainstream international financial system by ensuring that transactions that they facilitate do not transfer value into or out of crypto-assets issued by sanctioned countries. An example of this would be the efforts by cryptocurrency exchanges to block bitcoin transactions to the petro presale, or the Venezuelan cryptocurrency exchanges purportedly licensed to offer petro trading.

Regulators also have the opportunity to use blockchain monitoring to track flows of funds in foreign crypto-assets and ensure sanctions compliance. Screening of cryptocurrency transactions can be achieved through the use of blockchain-based transaction screening tools such as Elliptic’s AML software.

Interested in using blockchain analysis to understand the flows of cryptocurrencies? Learn more about how Elliptic helps regulators, financial institutions and bitcoin exchanges trace crypto transactions.