‘You cannot contradict the word of the president’

Mr. Maduro ratcheted up his public campaign for the Petro. He didn’t have many other tricks up his sleeve to combat hyperinflation, which in just four months had destroyed 90 percent of the value of the bolívar. Members of the opposition were openly calling for a coup.

As Mr. Jiménez watched Mr. Maduro’s televised talks, he was astonished by how much of what he had said at La Roca had gotten through to the president. Mr. Maduro mentioned Ethereum, white papers and transparency.

But the speeches also made it clear to Mr. Jiménez that he was no longer in control of the Petro. Mr. Maduro announced that the currency would, in fact, be tied to a specific block of the Orinoco Belt — exactly what Mr. Jiménez had argued against. He complained to Mr. Vargas, but was shot down: “You cannot contradict the word of the president.” Mr. Vargas told Mr. Jiménez to rewrite the Petro’s white paper to reflect Mr. Maduro’s decision — and to do it quickly. He and the vice president were about to travel to Turkey and Qatar to begin selling the Petro to investors.

Things deteriorated rapidly. The president’s excitement turned the Petro into a project that everyone wanted to get in on, and in mid-January 2018 a series of meetings at the ministry of finance turned contentious. The department’s top economic adviser wanted the Petro to have a stable value, controlled by the government, with an option to trade it in for actual oil. Mr. Jiménez managed to push back, winning an agreement that oil could be used to create a minimum value the state would promise to honor, but that the price would also be allowed to fluctuate on open markets. He also made sure the Petro would exist on an open network of computers, tied to Ether, that would fundamentally limit the government’s power to interfere.

Eventually, Mr. Jiménez became convinced that he’d lose control of the project to the finance ministry. When he tried to resist sharing a digital copy of the white paper, he said, the minister told him by phone: “You have to understand that this is now a project of the state. If you don’t hand over the file, I won’t be responsible for what happens to you.”

Some of the staff at The Social Us worried that Mr. Jiménez’s bullheaded desire to make the Petro happen put them all in danger. During another confrontation, Mr. Vargas had showed Mr. Jiménez blue folders containing intelligence dossiers compiled on the employees; after yet another dispute, triggered in part by the fact that the start-up had not been paid anything, the vice president sent word to Mr. Jiménez that he now considered him a traitor.

It would have been reasonable at that point to assume that he was headed to prison, and that his role in the Petro was over. And yet Mr. Jiménez was pulled back into the program in a shambolic series of events. The government told his team that they would need to compete to have a role in the Petro’s launch — against a Russian group of murky origin. Mr. Jiménez’s employees could find no evidence that they had any significant cryptocurrency experience; Time magazine later advanced a theory that they represented a Kremlin effort to control the Petro.