The pre-sale of Petro, the cryptocurrency driven by the Venezuelan state, carried out this February 20, has been full of confusion, uncertainty and changes at the last minute, while in the country, at the same time, cryptocurrencies seem to be being adopted in general to an unprecedented level.
One of the main problems that has occurred in this pre-sale is the uncertainty about which network would be used to launch the Petro, since from the beginning the Venezuelan authorities had announced that the Petro would be an ERC-20 token in the blockchain of Ethereum, however, on the morning of this day, according to the official buyer's manual of Petro, it was established that this cryptocurrency would be based on the blockchain of NEM. Something that, in addition, was confirmed by the developer team of said platform.
Later, on the afternoon of that same day, it was re-placed that would be based on the Ethereum network, but several hours later, at the time of writing this article, the official information shows again that the Petro will be supported in the network of the NEM.
At the moment, it seems that there are Petro tokens contracts both the Ethereum network and the NEM network. And that's not all, because the total supply shown in the last of these blockchain exceeds what was previously expected. In addition, in Ethereum you can find, at the time of writing, only 5 transfers and the same number of possessors of the tokens.
For its part, in the official Twitter account of the Journalistic Writing Room of the Presidency of Venezuela, it is possible to find a photograph where President Maduro is allegedly meeting with representatives of the NEM Foundation, a fact that at the moment has not been could confirm officially.
The government also reported closing an agreement with Aerotrading, a company that, according to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, is one of the largest blockchain companies. However, the company is not known in the ecosystem nor appears in Google searches. This information was also published by the Vice Presidency of the Republic.
If a trend search is done on the web, the only country in the world where Aerotrading is spoken of is Venezuela, which is, to say the least, disconcerting; even more taking into account that President Maduro mentioned that this is "one of the biggest blockchain companies".
Apart from all this, many users have exclaimed through social networks that the platform of the Petro does not let them complete their registration for the pre-sale, claiming that the confirmation email of their registration has not been sent to them. Despite this, it was announced that the Venezuelan state has about 735 million dollars in "purchase intentions" for the Petro.
However, not everything has been inconvenient. The Venezuelan president also announced that the state companies Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), Petroquímica de Venezuela (PEQUIVEN) and Corporación Venezolana de Guayana (CVG), in charge of exploiting forest and mineral resources for the country's development, would make purchase and sale transactions with the Petro.
Likewise, it was announced the approval of the payments with Petro for the airlines, for the tourism sector, and for consular services, as well as the creation of student mining farms in universities throughout the country, the delivery of certificates to more than 5,000 miners. national, and the authorization for savings banks, which are non-profit civil associations created and directed by their associates to promote savings by managing and investing the contributions made, acquire cryptoactive to protect the funds of more than 6 million workers .
THE JOURNEY OF PETRO
Recall that the Petro was announced at the beginning of December 2017. After that, it has suffered an avalanche of hypothesis and changes in its operation, where even Decred was considered as the blockchain that would emit it.
The recent circumstances have meant that Petro's pre-sale is surrounded by a lot of distrust and uncertainty. However, this is not the first time that the authorities have made changes to the Petro project in a sudden way, since the original Petro White Paper was previously modified to eliminate the section corresponding to the Vibe Foundation.
It is important to bear in mind that US investors will not be able to invest in this cryptocurrency and, in addition, the Venezuelan National Assembly declared it unconstitutional last January. Despite this, these obstacles have not stopped the Venezuelan government, and even Petro is expected to be only the first of a series of cryptocurrencies based on the country's natural resources.
And although Petro will not be a minable cryptocurrency, but completely centralized, it seems that the Venezuelan government is interested in mining other cryptocurrencies. In addition to today's statements about the installation of mining farms in universities, recently the Venezuelan authorities declared that the Venezuelan companies of Technological Industry (VIT) and Inspur are working on a prototype of national hardware called VIT Mining E8000, destined to the mining of cryptoactives.