Ever since it was announced, Petro, the crypto backed by oil, has seemed an implausible project.
However, it has been finally possible to carry out a test that shows its real existence, including the fact that it can be traded and that the blockchain of Petro is truly public.
It all started with a tweet by a Venezuelan crypto lawyer who published screenshots of his Petro wallet and a transaction carried out with this cryptocurrency.
To verify that those screenshots were real, the lawyer carried out a transaction to verify that the cryptocurrency was actually working.
The lawyer then successfully sent some Petro to a wallet. In addition, the transaction was recorded on the public blockchain visible on the explorer.
So, in the light of this test, one can say that the wallets to store and send Petro do exist and work. Even the explorer of the Petro blockchain is operational, although it does not show the list of blocks: these are accessible only individually knowing the hashes or addresses of the wallets.
Petro is not based on NEM, as was assumed at first, but appears as a copy of Dash, which is one of the cryptocurrencies that is spreading most in the country. For example, Petro’s public address format contains 34 characters and includes uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers, just like Dash’s.
An address containing 5,000 Petro (PTR) has been also discovered on the Petro blockchain, which seems to earn the crypto perhaps thanks to the management of a masternode similar to those of Dash.
PTR, however, is not yet tradable on any exchange, so it is not yet clear what is its real market value.
For example, the Venezuelan central bank says that 1 PTR is worth 36,000 sovereign bolivars, or about $17, but this conversion rate is not set by the market and the Bolivar itself is losing value quickly due to hyperinflation.
There are no public and independent data on the market value of Petro and not even platforms like CoinMarketCap are able to collect and publish them. It will be necessary to wait for some exchange to make it tradable to be able to publicly observe what value the market will give to PTR.
There is still no confirmation of the oil reserves to which the value of Petro would be linked and, to date, it appears that no customer has yet agreed to buy Venezuelan oil by paying in PTR, not even Russia.
Obviously, the operation of the wallet and explorer is a good step forward, although the lack of public data still makes it very difficult to understand how many PTRs have actually been issued, how many are in circulation and how many are actually traded.
