Petro, a cryptocurrency created and emitted by the Venezuelan government keeps facing problems. This time, Bitfinex, one of the largest and most important cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, published a statement in which it refused the possibility to list the Venezuelan token on its platform and urged its employees not to invest money or have any connection with the Petro project.
The cryptocurrency exchange clearly highlighted it was never planning on listing Petro or any similar tokens. Moreover, having in mind the sanctions against Petro imposed by the United States of America, Bitfinex will not perform any activities related to Petro. This is a restriction that the company is extending to all its users and employees. The statement was published yesterday in Taiwan: “We have never had plans to include the PTR or similar tokens in the Bitfinex trading platform. In light of the U.S. sanctions and the other clear sanctions risks of dealing in these products, Bitfinex will not list or transact the PTR or other similar digital tokens. This restriction extends to all customers of the platform, including U.S. persons, and to all activities on Bitfinex, including deposits, financing, trading, and withdrawals.”
Moreover, the cryptocurrency exchange also prohibited its employees and contractors to execute transactions with Petro or other similar tokens. This measure came into force immediately. Bitfinex considers Petro to be an intent to avoid the sanctions against the Venezuelan government and that is why the company prefers to stay away from any commercial relation with the Venezuelan cryptocurrency.
The measures introduced by the United States government keep away Petro from other important cryptocurrency exchanges such as Bittrex, Kraken, Bitfury, Coinbase/GDAX, Gemini and others. These cryptocurrency exchange platforms also cannot list the Venezuelan cryptocurrency. Because of this, the list of important allies mentioned by official sources from the Venezuelan government is becoming shorter and shorter.
Even though the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, insisted that Petro has formed important alliances, he did not reveal the names of many of these partners.
On the other hand, the project has been qualified as a scam by some websites specialized in the analysis of initial coin offerings (ICOs), such as icoindex.com. This was due to the lack of information about the Petro project, such as the GitHub repository.
