Nicolas Maduro promised that Venezuela would have “monetary sovereignty” with this currency and that it would help them skip the economic sanctions they had received in 2017. The appearance of the Petro served for the Venezuelan crypto sector to grow and for adoption in the country to increase. will accelerate, but everything has taken a hit due to corruption. Sunacrip is arrested after the PDVSA Crypto plot and its president is in prison. The Venezuelan crypto sector is waiting to find out what will happen to cryptocurrencies in the country.
“I have studied this topic intensively and I want to announce that Venezuela is going to implement a cryptocurrency system, the petro currency,” this is how Nicolas Maduro, Venezuelan president, announced the creation of the Petro, the crypto that promised to rescue the national economy and that has been forgotten after six years.
In fact, the Petro has been progressively disappearing from government discourse and official advertisements. It went from being a reference to measure the minimum wage to being a mere memory of another government promise that remained unfulfilled.
2017: Venezuelan Petro Genesis
To understand where the Petro comes from, it is necessary to go back to 2017, the year of its birth. If the contemporary history of Venezuela is reviewed, 2017 can be considered the worst year ever experienced.
In the political sphere, the longest and most violent day of protest in its history was experienced. The National Assembly with an opposition majority lost most of its powers, leaving an opposition inoperative and divided. On the economic level the situation worsened. The hyperinflation cycle began, the shortage worsened and the dollar reached historical highs.
All this gave rise to the structure beginning to break down on a social level. A great migratory wave began that led the number of Venezuelan migrants to reach 7 million people. By early 2017, Bitcoin was in the $1,000 range and the number of profitable projects was limited, but there was a golden opportunity that was just beginning: cryptocurrency miners.
Thanks to low energy prices and devaluation, purchasing Bitcoin mining equipment and installing it in Venezuela was extremely profitable. Although this practice had been going on since at least 2014, 2017 was the year it became popular. But as often happens in Venezuela, as soon as it became mainstream, the government decided to interfere.
The Corruption Plot Linked to the Venezuelan Petro
The crypto sector in Venezuela seemed to be going stronger and stronger, until a large wave of arrests unleashed in May 2023, in what was known as the PDVSA Crypto case, a corruption plot that led to the arrest of 60 people involved.
It all started when social networks leaked that arrests were being made among the ruling leadership and allies of those involved. The rumors did not stop coming and they all pointed to Tareck el Aisammi as the main person involved.
The plot is focused on Venezuelan government companies, mainly PDVSA, the state oil company. According to the Attorney General, Tareck William Saab, Sunacrip created a “parallel” structure that received funds from state companies and manipulated them at will without any control. After this, Sunacrip was intervened, its operations stopped and the crypto industry entered a moment of paralysis where, without a regulatory body, it cannot operate with legal freedom.
Ultimately, the Petro experiment, the Venezuelan government’s crypto project, has been forgotten. Many still remember this, but everything indicates that it is already a thing of the past.
By Leonardo Pérez
