Venezuela is hoping the world's oil markets will start using its controversial national cryptocurrency, the petro.
Manuel Quevedo, the country's minister of petroleum and the president of state-owned oil company PDVSA, announced in a tweet on Wednesday, that Venezuela will take petro to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 2019, as the "main digital currency backed by oil."
Another PDVSA tweet shows a news clip of Quevedo talking on the subject, captioned with the quote:
"Petro will become the digital currency of oil transactions worldwide; we will present it to OPEC, it is one of the internationalization measures of the currency."The move is aimed to enable Venezuela to start using the token to market its oil from the first quarter of next year, according to a report from Prensa Latina, the state news agency of Cuba.