The private pre-sale of the Venezuelan cryptocurrency, Petro, was scheduled for February 20 at 8:30 (Venezuela time at 04:00 UTC), according to the petro white paper.
However, at midnight local time on February 20, the government announced that petro presale had begun and published a buyer’s manual and an anti-money laundering compliance manual (AML).
A total of 82.4 million Petro tokens are offered for the pre-sale phase. The vice president of the country, Tareck El Aissami, confirmed Monday from the Miraflores building: “The Petro tokens can be bought by Venezuelan citizens and other foreign citizens”.
Superintendent Carlos Vargas said:” The pre-sale and initial offer will be made in strong currencies and cryptocurrencies, but not bolivar … Our responsibility is to put (the petro) in the best hands and then a secondary market will appear.”
Interested buyers can visit the Etherdelta platform to send private orders to the Ethereum address provided by the superintendent. However, at the time of writing this document, no order has been matched and no price is displayed on the price chart.
This could be due to technical problems in the purchasing process, such as a Javascript error that prevents users from completing their purchases.
According to the minister for university education, science and technology, Hugbel Roa, the traffic to the Petro website “has quintupled with the global announcement of the pre-sale of the Venezuelan cryptocurrency”, shortly after midnight local time .
Despite the technical challenges, the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, said:
Venezuela had received $ 735 million on the first day of a presale of the “Petro” cryptocurrency.
The only thing necessary to store the digital coin is to open a digital Petro walle, according to Petro’s website. “Once opened, your wallet will generate an email address that you can share with anyone who wants to transfer PTR to your wallet. You will be able to receive and deposit your PTRs in this email address. ”
The buyer’s manual describes in detail how to register and gain access to a petro wallet, which requires potential buyers to download an installation file with automatic deletion and zip. “The digital portfolio creation data package is configured to self-destruct once the installation is complete,” warn the instructions.
Next to the steps to register and install the Petro wallet, the manual goes beyond the protection of users’ private keys, but it is not enough to ask users to generate a public key, which would be necessary for any type of cryptocurrency deposit. More curiously, however, was the vague announcement regarding the use of the NEM blockchain:
The Blockchain launched by the Venezuelan state has solid security mechanisms because its programming elements are linked to a technological platform called: blockchain NEM.
NEM cryptocurrency, which uses centralized servers running closed-source code, has recently been in the news following the hack of one of Japan’s largest cryptographic exchanges, Coincheck, which lost 58 billion yen (~ $ 539 million of dollars) of cryptocurrency.
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