When they’re not about hyperinflation, reports out of Venezuela tend to focus on the country’s tight relationship with the latest tech, and this one is no different.
Just days after Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro survived the first ever presidential assassination attempt using a drone, the President announces a new policy designed to stave off the near-apocalyptic levels of hyperinflation: cryptocurrency as a national coin.
As we reported previously, Venezuela’s currency reached such levels that its official coin, the Bolivar, is reminding everyone of the American Great Depression. 200,000 bolivars can be used to purchase a single egg and $1 (one US dollar) can buy three million liters of heavily subsidized gas.
To try to pull out Venezuela out of a crisis brought by low oil prices and US sanctions, Nicolás Maduro turned to cryptocurrency and the Petro coin. The Petro Cryptocurrency will be the secondary official currency in Venezuela, a country where some citizens manage to stave off starvation by using cheap electricity to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. All of this is after Maduro once again knocked off a few zeros off the Bolivar… because no one can even be bothered to count them at this point. In time for the Petro cryptocurrency, citizens will be able to exchange 100,000 old bolivars for 1 new sovereign Bolivar.
“As of next Monday, Venezuela will have a second accounting unit based on […] the value of the Petro. It will be a second accounting unit of the Republic and will begin operations as a mandatory accounting unit of our PDVSA oil industry,” said Maduro in a televised address.
His plan will be put in motion next week and could very well be the largest-scale deployment of cryptocurrency as actual currency, not as a store of value (for Bitcoin) or as promising but the yet-unlaunched backbone of the Internet (in the case of Ethereum). Hopefully, Venezuelans will benefit from this desperate move.
Also read: ✍HTC Exodus Blockchain Phone Coming Soon, CryptoKitties in Tow✍
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