Venezuela was one of the wealthiest Latin American countries back in the 1990s, sadly that’s not the case anymore. Now their whole economy is on the edge of collapse – actually been collapsing for years by now.

The country has almost nothing but cheap oil and electricity. Imagine that, you can go to the supermarket, and you realize, there is no toilet paper on the shelves or bread or even beer. On the other hand, you can fill your car up with gasoline for less than a dollar. Insane, isn’t it? This country is the prime example on how BTC or a government backed cryptocurrency could save the masses. The fiat that they are using has become worthless because of the hyperinflation and several people have moved on to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to make a living.

Now Nicolas Maduro, the prime minister, and his government officials came up with a possible solution. Maduro was a former autobus driver and is now the leader of the nation. He is also mainly responsible of the current situation that is happening in Venezuela. At first he wasn’t very keen to adopting cryptocurrencies, but he realized soon that these coins have real market values.

There were several reports, where people were abducted for mining BTC and other digital assets. Mining Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies with cheap electricity offers a competitive advantage and also better profits compared to other countries. These people sadly are open targets both for the government (and for gangs) as the coins they mine have a higher value and lower inflation than their own currency. Police raids happened everywhere, turning mining operations down and even imprisoning miners just to demonstrate power. Since there were no clear regulations for the cryptocurrencies, they used different charges, such as energy theft or possession of contraband.

On the 3rd of December he announced the launch of the Petro cryptocurrency on his weekly television show. According to the Venezuelan government, every Petro is going to be backed by one barrel of oil. Luckily for them, they could consider this as an option as Venezuelan oil reserves are recognized as the largest in the world currently.

The Petro currency was launched yesterday, but it didn’t have a very smooth launch even with the low standards that the crypto and ICO scene has in general. The website‘s homepage is only available in English and Spanish, but the Buyer’s manual, the AML Compliance manual and the Presale sub-site is only available in Spanish. The manual had no easy to understand instructions on the investment process. This reduces the number of potential investors by a lot. There has been a video issued from the launch, but it didn’t seem to be very professional either.

As twitter user @ivanacostarubio reported there were also major problems with the Petro ICO website that hindered people from participating in the presale:

Javascript error hinders the pre-sale of the first crypto currency backed by a Country. El Petro. 🇻🇪 pic.twitter.com/HcYX08OBYv — Ivan 🔑 (@ivanacostarubio) February 20, 2018

The maximum numbers of tokens that are for sale during the ICO is 100,000,000 and the price of 1 Petro is 60 USD. The total goal of funding is 2,088,000,00B USD. Allocation of tokens will be done according to:

Technological development: 15.00%

Ecosystem development: 15.00%

Petro project: 15%

Sovereign Fund: 55%

The website foundico currently reports that only 4% of the funding goal has been accomplished so far. We hope that even though the idea seems sketchy at first, it will help the Venezuelan people to step out of the current economic misery.