“I bought Petro for 1 year and I can’t sell it now”: Patria platform user

“Gustavo Molina” is a 72-year-old retired engineer from Venezuela. His life was dedicated to work and his family. The international money issue and new forms of money have always caught his attention. When he first heard about Bitcoin, he was immediately interested, as was Petro, a cryptocurrency project run by the government of his country.

As a member of the Patria platform, a system of government subsidies, Gustavo considered in late 2018 the possibility of buying Petros and keeping them in a new service called “Petro Savings”, which could help him get rid of the Bolivar Get it as government aid and try to avoid hyperinflation.

On December 6th of the same year made his first purchase for 0.1 petro, which was immediately assigned. He had made two more purchases before the end of the year after receiving two “bonds” from the state.

«Between December 2018 and December 2019, I bought Petro 35 times. I exchanged all the bonds that came to me for the cryptocurrency and collected them to save. After each purchase and over the months, interest in Bolivar that generated every investment began to grow. These interests were also used to buy Petros, ”said Gustavo CriptoNoticias, who preferred to protect his true identity.

The interests Gustavo speaks of are actually the quarterly write-offs he received on the 90th, 180th, 270th and end of the year when the savings began.

The option to exchange Petro for Bolivar on the Patria platform was activated after the National Superintendency for Venezuela’s cryptoactive and related activities (Sunacrip) found in December last year that the system would perform functions similar to a cryptocurrency exchange.

The new option was theoretically ideal for Molina because he could now place an order and exchange a fraction of his savings in Petros for Bolivar.

The engineer’s ordeal started in March 2020 when he first tried to redeem 0.2 PTR to buy food and medicine.

“This 0.2 PTR order was returned after a few days because apparently no one was interested. In the same week I placed another order for 0.1 PTR and it was not processed either, it was returned. There are already 11 returns, ”said our respondent, who added:

“At first I thought there was a problem with the platform, but now I’m worried because I’ve already tried to sell Petros in different quantities and I don’t get bolivars, no one buys this in Patria. The worst part is that I bought Petro for 1 year and I can’t sell it now. What the system gives is the message “Refund due to the expiry of the contribution,” emphasized the retired person, who lives in the state of Zulia, about 650 kilometers west of Caracas.

“Protect Savings”

The “Petro Savings” was a plan the national government announced in November 2018 as an alternative for users of the Patria system to convert their subsidies in Bolivar to Petro. At the end of the first year of the program, Nicolás Maduro said that he was obliged to protect users’ savings because they had trusted this “wonderful creation”.

CryptoNews found that the The system continues to actively write off users who have saved in this mode in petro. When buying Petros with Bolivar, however, it is shown that these have not been added as “savings with active Petro” for months, but because the wallet at Petros was able to send the “Petro Aguinaldo”. In December last year, these Petros purchased as savings are not amortized, but are instead accumulated in the new wallet.

It follows from the above that the original “Petro Savings” would have been changed without an official announcement, since those who saved in Petros now have “two portfolios”, one of which contains the PTR, the “Petro Savings” “It is not possible to enter new Petros and the new wallet that is the goal of those who exchange their bonds for this cryptocurrency without receiving amortization.

The system offers the option of grouping both amounts in the new wallet and transferring the desired amount of saved petros.

This newspaper has tried to contact an authorized Sunacrip person in the past to get answers to these types of cases, but requests for comments have not been returned. It just tells them that the request needs to be prepared and sent, and that they then contact CryptoNews, which hasn’t happened yet.

Buy bitcoin

While Gustavo continues to sell his Petros to buy Bolivar, he has confirmed that in the government-authorized cryptocurrency exchange offices, the price they offer for the Petros is well below their official price, which is theoretically 10 is millions of bolivars per unit.

This number is the result of multiplying $ 60, which according to your white paper is the price of the asset, by the price of the dollar in Bolivar issued by the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV), which is currently around 179,000 bolivar per dollar.

Because of the impossibility of exchanging their petros, With the help of the government, Gustavo decided not to buy any more PTR. Instead, he transfers the bolivar to his bank account and buys bitcoins from there, which he has already done with other of his monthly earnings in the past.

Gustavo’s case shows that there are many Petros offers for sale on the Patria platform, but if there are few buyers, most exchange requests will be returned with no positive results, dampening their savings without being able to use them affect more than three million people.