Cryptoviagra became famous. They even speak of him as the only recognized person who bought Petros.
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SPECIAL REPORT-Petro, the cryptocurrency of Venezuela that is nowhere to be found
By Brian Ellsworth
ATAPIRIRE, Venezuela (Reuters) - When one listens to the leftist president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, this remote village of 1,300 souls seems to be at the forefront of innovation in cryptocurrencies.
Image of a non-operational oil extraction well near Atapirire, Venezuela. May 10, 2018. REUTERS / William Urdaneta
Located in an isolated savannah in the center of the country, Atapirire is the only city in an area that according to the Government is overflowing with 5,000 million barrels of oil.
Venezuela says that these reserves are the backing of a digital currency called "petro", which Maduro launched in February. This month he assured that it will be the cornerstone of a recovery plan for this nation submerged in the crisis.
However, residents of Atapirire say they have not seen any government effort to take advantage of those reserves. And they have little confidence that their impoverished people will have a front row seat for a revolution in finance.
"That petro here does not feel," said Igdalia Díaz, a housewife, as she began a tirade about the ruined school in her town, the roads in disrepair, the frequent blackouts and the perpetual hunger that plagues her countrymen.
The truth is that the petro is difficult to detect almost anywhere.
Over a period of four months, Reuters spoke with a dozen experts in cryptocurrencies and oilfield valuation, traveled to the site of oil reserves cited by the government and reviewed the digital transaction records to learn more about the cryptocurrency.
The search yielded very little evidence of a prosperous petro trade. The currency is not sold in any important place of exchange of cryptocurrencies. There are no shops that accept it.
The few buyers Reuters was able to locate were those who published their experiences in online cryptocurrency forums. None wanted to identify. One complained about being "swindled". Another told Reuters that he had received his petros without problems; He blamed the US sanctions against Venezuela and the "terrible press coverage" for damaging the debut of the Venezuelan cryptocurrency.
Senior government officials have given contradictory statements. Maduro says that petros sales have already raised $ 3.3 billion and that the currency is being used to pay for imports.
But Hugbel Roa, a cabinet minister involved in the project, told Reuters on August 24 that the technology behind the coin is still under development and that "no one has been able to make use of the petro (...) nor has it been received. the resource".
Even the Superintendent of Cryptoactives, the government agency that oversees the petro, is a mystery. Reuters recently visited the Ministry of Finance, where the Superintendency is supposed to be located, but a receptionist informed him that "he still does not have a physical presence here."
The website of the Superintendency is not working. Its president, Joselit Ramírez, did not respond to the messages in his personal social network accounts. The Ministry of Industry and National Production, which oversees the agency, did not answer calls and the Ministry of Information did not respond to requests for comments.
Maduro added further confusion by announcing this month that salaries, pensions and the exchange rate of Venezuela's decimated currency, the bolivar, would now be linked to the petro. That movement generated confusion in the streets of Venezuela and among economists and experts in cryptocurrencies, who say it is unfeasible to anchor the currency to the petro.
"There is no way to link prices or exchange rates to a 'token' that is not marketed, precisely because there is no way to know how much it actually sells," said Alejandro Machado, a Venezuelan computer engineer and chain advisor. that has closely followed the petro.
The chaos reflects the desperation and disorganization that seems to be trapping Maduro's government as Venezuela crumbles.
It was assumed that oil would help his administration to weather the hyperinflation that has made the bolivar worthless. He promised that a cryptocurrency, which allows financial operations to be carried out anonymously, would allow Venezuela to evade the financial sanctions of the United States and collect foreign currency to pay for imports of much-needed food and medicine.
The government set the value of the petroleum at the price of a barrel of Venezuelan oil - currently around $ 66 - and promised to back it with oil reserves located in a 380-square-kilometer area around Atapirire. The president of the United States, Donald Trump, in March prohibited Americans from buying or using petro.
However, the digital records associated with the "token" do not provide enough information to determine how much was actually collected, according to experts, who are skeptical about Maduro's claims that the oil has already brought billions of foreign currency into the country.
As they claim, digital records associated with the initial offer of currencies, or ICO, do not provide enough information to determine how much has actually been collected, if there has been any income.
"This certainly does not look like a typical ICO, given the low level of transaction activity," said Tom Robinson, data director and co-founder of Elliptic, a block-chain data company based in London. "We have not found evidence that someone has been issued a petro, or that it is actively negotiated," he said.
A visit by Reuters to the area around Atapirire showed little activity in the oil industry. The only visible equipment were small and aging machines installed years ago. Several were abandoned and were covered by brush.
In an opinion piece published on August 19 in Aporrea, a website of Venezuelan comments and analysis, the former Minister of Petroleum, Rafael Ramírez, estimated that it would take 20,000 million dollars in investments to exploit Atapirire, money that the state oil company Venezuelan PDVSA does not have.
"An arbitrary value is fixed, which only exists in the imagination of the government, to the petro," wrote Ramírez, who oversaw the Venezuelan oil industry for a decade under the government of the late President Hugo Chávez.
Ramírez is now in exile, in an undisclosed location after being accused of corruption by the Venezuelan government, a complaint he denies.
PDVSA did not respond to an email seeking comment.
"WE HAVE BEEN SCAMED"
Unlike buyers of well-known cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, petros holders are hard to find.
A site to locate them can be an online cryptocurrency forum called Bitcointalk, where petros buyers started posting messages early in 2018.
In some messages, several complained about the lack of information and the delays in obtaining their coins. One said that he could not transfer or sell the "tokens".
"So far, we have been swindled, time will tell whether it was a good investment or not," wrote an investor named cryptoviagra on June 25.
Another investor, the only one who answered Reuters' questions, said through social media messages that his experience with the purchase of petros "worked quite well in general."
He blamed Washington's ban for depressing petro sales, along with what he considered a negative media coverage. He asked that his name be hidden because he feared "persecution" by the US government and added that "I do not consider Reuters an honest news organization."
Reuters could not confirm independently whether the forum participants had invested in the petro.
Cryptocurrencies gained popularity in the last decade, led by activists who said they reduce the costs of financial transactions, give commercial banks alternatives to citizens and protect them from inflation induced by central bank policies.
The transactions are validated by a network of computers and registered in an accounting book called a blockchain.
Individual operations are available for anyone to see on the internet, but the identities of those involved are kept secret. The operations are protected by cryptography or the coding and decoding of computerized data.
The fever of purchases of cryptoactives in 2017 brought the price of Bitcoin to almost $ 20,000. Its success fueled a wave of currency offers from other companies, including scams that raised millions of dollars before being dissolved by the authorities.
Cryptocurrency issuers seeking transparency in fundraising use the block chain's accounting books to show each individual purchase of the new currency.
That gives potential investors an idea of how much money is flowing and provides a relative indicator of demand. On the other hand, the Venezuelan government does not provide a purchase registry.
The so-called "white paper" of the petro, the name given to the public document that describes the conditions of the offer for potential buyers, says that the main platform for the currency is NEM, a decentralized "blockchain" network promoted by an organization without for profit based in Singapore.
The owners of NEM accounts are anonymous, but they can reveal their identities in the description of their currencies if they wish.
In March, a NEM account claiming to be operated by the Venezuelan government issued 82.4 million "tokens" as part of an ICO associated with a digital currency described as the petro. Those seemed to correspond to a set of "preliminary" currencies described in the white paper that buyers could then exchange for petros when the ICO is completed.
About 2,300 of those "tokens" were transferred to 200 anonymous accounts in small quantities in early May, NEM records show.
That lapse is consistent with comments posted by participants in the Bitcointalk forum who said they were buying petros.
If they were sold at the price set by Maduro based on oil prices at that time, the sale of those "tokens" would have raised around $ 150,000, according to Reuters calculations.
In April, another anonymous NEM account issued a different set of "tokens" that it described as part of a separate phase of the petro targeting major investors. That account transferred in June around 13 million tokens to a dozen anonymous accounts, according to the NEM records.
This sale would have raised around 850 million dollars at official prices. But there is no way to verify that those were sales, and no large investor has admitted taking a position in the petro.
Roa, the Minister of University Education, Science and Technology, oversees a state agency called Blockchain Observatory of Venezuela and seemed to validate the analysts' suspicions that the petro, at present, does not exist as a functional currency.
Reuters spoke briefly with him on the margins of an event in Caracas last week. Roa described NEM transactions as "early models" and added that Venezuela was now working on its own blockchain technology. He said buyers have made "reservations" to buy petros, but no coins have been released.
What is clear is that petro is not freely traded in any major exchange of cryptocurrencies.
Bitfinex, based in Hong Kong, one of the largest exchange sites in the world by volume, said in March that it never proposed to offer petros due to its "limited utility" and officially banned it on its platform after US sanctions. .
Three other prominent exchange sites -Coinbase, based in San Francisco; Bittrex, in Seattle; and Kraken, in San Francisco-declined to comment or did not answer questions about why they did not include the petro.
Maduro announced on April 26 that 16 exchange houses had been authorized to trade with the petro. Most are little known in the world of cryptography.
Reuters could not locate seven of the exchanges, without internet presence. Seven others did not respond to requests for comment. Italcambio, a Venezuelan exchange house that Maduro said would negotiate with the currency, does not trade or sell petros, said its president, Carlos Dorado, in an email in response to a Reuters consultation.
The only exchange that has publicly discussed plans to include petro is Coinsecure, from India.
In an interview with Reuters earlier this month, general manager Mohit Kalra said Coinsecure would provide an exchange to Venezuela in two months to operate petros, along with the technology to operate it, and that Venezuela would pay royalties for its use.
Kalra did not answer the calls for additional information.
"WHAT IS A PETRO?"
Oil is the heart of Venezuela's economy. By opting to support its petroleum with oil, the country joined a small but growing number of cryptocurrency issuers that link the value of their "tokens" to physical raw materials.
The Royal Mint, which produces coins for the United Kingdom, announced in 2017 a digital currency backed by gold called RMG. In addition, other "tokens" backed by diamonds have emerged.
The big difference is that cryptocurrencies are linked to physical assets that can be easily exchanged. On the contrary, Maduro has promised that the petro will be backed by oil reserves that are still underground near Atapirire, in a block known as Ayacucho I.
The government said the field contains 5,300 million barrels, citing data from "an independent international certification agency." PDVSA did not answer emails looking for details.
No matter how much oil it contains, the area lacks the infrastructure to extract it, including roads, pipelines and power generation, said Francisco Monaldi, a Venezuelan who now teaches Latin American energy policy at Rice University in Houston.
"There is no investment plan for this area and there is no reason to think it would develop before other fields with better conditions," he said.
Only locating the block requires significant effort. PDVSA employees who agreed to take a journalist there confused him with another block and Reuters had to map Ayacucho I with GPS software using the coordinates published by the government as part of the creation of the petro.
Meanwhile in Atapirire, residents say they have been forgotten. A fish farm that used to provide employment is now abandoned. The clinic in the city has no doctor or ambulance in operation.
Many spend hours waiting along the dusty road for buses made in China that serve as the only public transport to El Tigre, a major oil hub located 60 kilometers north of Atapirire.
Teacher Rosa Álvarez, 30, said that about half of the first-grade children she teaches stopped going to class because they are hungry and the public school no longer offers state-subsidized lunches. He added that government officials have ignored his complaints.
But in May, the Ministry of Education established a new mandate: to teach students the virtues of the new Venezuelan cryptocurrency.
Standing in front of a blackboard earlier this year, while her students laughed and chatted, Álvarez said she was puzzled. "How am I going to explain that if nobody tells me what a petro is?" He said. "How do you buy a petro? With what?".
Let's see what is comming
