Petro - a brilliant scam?

According to a Reuters report last week, Venezuela's oil-backed cryptocurrency is largely unused and the government, despite promises, is doing nothing to put its oil reserves to use in this space.

Petro cannot be purchased on any major exchange such as Coinbase or Bitfinex and is not accepted by retailers as a means of payment. On online forums, Reuters employees were able to locate several petro owners. Petro transactions are anonymous, but their frequency and volume are very low even during various government announcements.

Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro said the initial coin offering on March 20 raised more than $3 billion, but the cabinet minister involved in the project told Reuters that at the time of the ICO, the coin was still in development and no one could use it. The Superintendence of Cryptoassets, the government agency spearheading petro's development, does not have a physical office and their website is down. 

Petro was launched in February, at the same time an announcement was made about the creation of the world's first sovereign cryptocurrency. Petro is developed on the Ethereum blockchain and is designed to prevent the effects of inflation and foreign sanctions. After the ICO and the launch of petro the price of the bolivar continued to fall rapidly. At the moment, one bolivar costs 0.000004 USD. 

Presumably, each petro should have been backed by one barrel of oil, the price of which is currently approximately $70. In the case of petro, this oil remains untapped somewhere underground. 

The government claims that the Atapirire region contains $5.3 billion in oil reserves, but even so, the government does not have any infrastructure or tools nearby to extract these resources.

According to theverge.com