Petro, Venezuela’s oil-backed cryptocurrency released its official whitepaper on Wednesday. The highly anticipated document that is signed off by president Nicolas Maduro outlines the crowdsale mechanism and token model that will be used to launch the ethereum based Petro in February. The white paper is now available for scrutiny.


Maduro’s $5 Billion ICO – Petro

On Wednesday, the Venezuelan government published the eagerly anticipated whitepaper of its new cryptocurrency, Petro. The availability of petro for pre-sale on February 20, is Venezuelan president’s attempt to control the inflation that is rampant in the oil-rich country.

It has been expected that the token sale of Petro will be bigger than the Filecoin, Tezos, EOS and even Telegram. To be exact its value may equal the total revenue generated in last year from ICOs. Due to the price of one PTR fixed at $60, in corresponding with a barrel of oil, it is going to be even more costly than the $50 Bitconnect X is looking for its ICO.

Moreover, the creators of petro promise that it is not a Ponzi scheme as claimed here:

“Petro will give investors the opportunity to enter the crypto asset market with an instrument of intrinsic value that is safer, more stable and susceptible to a fundamental analysis because it is linked to a widely known industry, and therefore, suitable to be used in large transactions and even as a store of value.”

The 22-page whitepaper is capably written and neatly formatted that makes it truly remarkable. It contains no such words as a disruptive technology but talks a lot about blockchain. Though there is no roadmap, every other necessity of a whitepaper is present and accounted for in Venezuela’s official document.


In an interview, the Science and Technology Minister Hugbel Rao describes the document as “navigational chart” for those that are interested in a new digital currency. He further mentioned that all the technical details are there on the website www.elpetro.gob.ve.

Moreover, the petro team is very confident about their digital currency as evident here:

“Petro is a much more ambitious project than other digital convertible currencies such as the digix (gold-backed) or the tether (backed in dollars), because it opens the opportunity for using other assets to backup the currency. Due to the condition of crypto asset with state sanction (non-control) on its own platform, the instrument has a massive adoption potential, with an approximate of 31 million people in Venezuela alone, that is, ten times the size of the global market for cryptocurrencies.”

Key Features of Petro ICO Whitepaper

The whitepaper has some amazing points that are worth mentioning:

About 100 million PTR will be created and each will be divisible into 100 million parts. The smallest unit of petro is called mene that is basically the second most spoken language in Venezuela. In the presale, approximately 38.4% of the tokens will be made available from February 20, whereas 44% will be available a month later and Venezuelan Superintendency of Currency and Related Activities will retain the remaining ones.

Furthermore, a number of discounts will be available for both the sales. The government has also promised that they will accept it as a payment mode.

“The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela guarantees that it will accept Petro’s [sic] as a form of payment of national taxes, fees, contributions and public services, taking as a reference the price of the barrel of the Venezuelan basket of the previous day with a percentage discount.”

Petro as an ERC20 will be tradable on DEXes and may even be listed by major non-US exchanges. Despite the whitepaper offering a sense of optimism, having a token backed by an ICO that is further backed by the oil reserves make it really complex and puts doubt on its feasibility.

Do you think petro will be successful? Would you invest in this ICO? Let us know your thoughts in our comment section below!

The presented content may include the personal opinion of the author and is subject to market condition. Do your market research before investing in cryptocurrencies. The author or the publication does not hold any responsibility for your personal financial loss.

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