Petro Deemed a Scam by Rating Sites

Although the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, remains bullish on petro as a way to stabilize the country’s economy, the crypto industry is far from thrilled. Since many aspects of the national, oil-backed cryptocurrency remain mysterious, Initial Coin Offering (ICO) rating sites are taking the safe path by simply calling it a scam.

For example, ICO rating site ICOindex.com gave the token a scam status, as it is “missing critical information,” and they “discourage people from wasting money on this project.” They also boldly proclaim that, “It looks like government is desperate in finding new funds so they are trying to scam rest of the world.”

Further, ICObench joins the group of petro-skeptics, giving petro a rating of 1.6 out of 5. This is even a step further from rating sites such as Cryptorated and ICOreview, who have not even bothered to give it a rating yet. Criptonoticias, an online news outlet covering crypto-related news for Spanaish speakers, point out that, “the petro raises more doubts than certainties,” adding that, “the absence of a development repository in Github is extremely striking, since this is one of the fundamental points to evaluate an ICO.”

Maduro claims to have raised up to USD 5 billion in the ICO presale, his optimism never wavering: “I call for no one to doubt the petro. The petro is the future of the cryptocurrency monetary system and Venezuela is on the lead. It’s the first country to create a digital coin, a state-backed cryptocurrency,” he said.

There is still no evidence to support these numbers. Even Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum platform, took to Twitter to warn his followers: “This is why the crypto community needs to move away from “yay, blockchain” and zoom in specifically on what is the trust model of each project. This one is definitely quite centralized, and dependent in multiple ways on a central party (venez gov) that seems not very trustworthy.”