Seems like the Venezuelan government has decided to shift the paradigm and end the reign of the US dollar as the only currency oil is traded in. The authorities are running a state-backed ICO campaign and launching a national cryptocurrency.
This should help Venezuela circumvent the sanctions and make financial transactions regardless. El Petro, as the coin is titled, should also help the country develop an independent and transparent digital economy. El Petro has also been pinned a lot of hopes on to build up a platform for digital assets and innovations in Venezuela. Either way, that’s what its government believes.
This situation in unique in the way that for the first time ever an ICO is being launched by a whole country instead of a company or a small team of developers. If this idea does gain enough traction, we’ll witness a new era in the global cryptoeconomy, bringing us one step closer to leaving fiat currencies behind. This situation will support the development of decentralized technological solutions that are absolutely vital for decentralized services to function properly. Such technological solutions include, for example, atomic swaps that we utilize in our project. The main idea behind it is to allow cryptocurrency holders to exchange their digital assets in peer-to-peer mode, achieving maximum decentralization. This mechanism allows two coin holders from different blockchains to make transactions between each other without an escrow. For example, you can sell GO tokens for Zcash. Before making the transaction every user agrees to a predetermined set of rules. Both coin holders sign the transaction with their private keys. The exchange is instant, fee-less, and does not require an intermediary escrow.
Going back to the Venezuelan oil-backed Petro, we can point out that its capitalization, by a very conservative estimate will reach about $1.8 trillion dollars, judging from the amount of oil the Venezuelan government has pledged to allocate towards backing the cryptocurrency. If this idea plays out nicely for the Venezuelan economy, this state-run ICO may open up the doors into the world of cryptocurrency for smaller private projects looking to raise millions for development as well as for whole national economies. What is also very important is that El Petro will be built atop the NEM blockchain, which means that our GO token will be easily tradeable with El Petro using atomic swaps.
Right now our developer team is looking into the exact technical implications of these transactions. We are living in an amazing time, and we are lucky to see this spectacular change that is bound to leave an imprint on every facet of human activity!