Venezuela is reportedly asking its central bank to hold on to its bitcoin reserves. Apparently, it’s not just its own currency that the government is employing to address the ramifications of cross border sanctions.
According to a recent report, the Central Bank of Venezuela is auditing the odds of retaining the cryptocurrencies to help Petroleos de Venezuela SA, the oil company controlled by the state. Apparently, Petroleos de Venezuela SA has hoarded BTC and ETH which will enable it to disburse the suppliers of the outstanding and future payments and dodge the potential bottlenecks that can arise through the conventional modes of payment.
In an earlier report, the central bank revealed its plan to hold Cryptocurrencies in the Internal Reserve System.
A girl who emigrated from Venezuela in an interview stated that Petroleos has been superfluous and only the government officials have been the ones to use it carry out trade across borders; she said,
“Nobody uses the Petro and only people close with government use it to skip out on U.S. sanctions — Sunacrip is really only for miners — they have installed crypto point-of-sale (POS) systems around some stores, but the POS only accepts bitcoin, Litecoin, and BNB, so if you have Petros, you need to exchange that.”
The central bank seems inclined towards the proposals to have an account of the volume of cryptocurrencies for international reserves proliferating in recent times.
The affirmations of Petroleos getting the Ethereum and Bitcoin has not been made, so one cannot speculate its volume anyway.
While crypto remains largely anonymous, there’s no guarantee whether the companies will endorse such a decision. With the rise in the number of crypto frauds and thefts, a large number of financial institutions are reconsidering the crypto landscape.
According to sources, the latest efforts by the government could be touted as “Hail Mary effort”, which aim to retain the economy of Venezuela and subsequently the government of Maduro. Its is difficult to say whether the risks would bear any results in the near future.
Earlier in July, Maduro, along with his associates was carrying out transactions with a digital wallet to transfer tax revenue collection from its airports using Bitcoin and other virtual currencies, which were transferred to Hong Kong, Russia, Hungary, and China-based exchanges.