(electronic music)
[Gabriel] They had no actual clue what they just approved.
The Venezuelan government is going to implement a
technology that basically is going to expose them.
To create a transparent economy in
the most corrupt regime in our history.
I was proposing to replace our worthless currency with
something that has never been made in the history of
cryptocurrency.
The amazing part about this is that I had the blessing of
the dictator.
(non-English speaker)
The Petro was a spearhead and a tool for freedom,
but it was a failure, and I ended up losing everything.
(exciting and slightly mysterious music)
My name is Gabriel Jimenez.
I'm from Venezuela and I'm an entrepreneur,
trying to build solutions for the people in my country.
Basically 90% of our revenue as a country overall comes from oil.
After Chávez got to power,
there was the oil barrel going up.
It's basically like winning the lottery.
He was spending in social programs too,
but also he started showing off his authoritarian way
of dealing with power, and then comes Maduro,
and at the same time, the price of the oil barrel crashed.
The government in their crisis,
they were just printing bolivars. And the economy started
to surge on inflation.
At the same time, the capital controls
were getting tighter for the importers.
Meat, milk, corn, toilet paper.
It created a huge scarcity in the country.
(non-English speaker)
(protest chanting)
Just like me, Venezuelans were frustrated.
Every year was going worse and worse
and worse and worse.
(darker piano and string music)
The people were buying corn flour, toilet paper, diapers.
And that was the way they stored their wealth.
If the people are using corn flour as currency, and toilet
paper as currency, the people wouldn't care
about using Bitcoin or Ethereum or Dash.
The people need something that works for them.
It doesn't matter what.
I realized that in my country,
nobody was speaking about cryptocurrency. Basically,
because if it's based on freedom, our state that wants to
control every aspect of the economy,
is going to be opposed to that.
And I started to go very publicly,
talking about what we can do for our country.
In the means of these public presentations,
and being in the media, we got contacted
by the government to go to the Central Bank.
We were very, very skeptical.
We actually thought it was going to be the political police
waiting for us.
They were curious about all of these solutions that
cryptocurrencies could bring. Out of nowhere,
a friend sent me a video of Maduro saying that he was
approving the Petro.
(non-English speaker)
I was like completely shocked.
And then I texted this official and I asked him:
Hey, did guys steal our project? What happened?
They told me, No they just approved it.
(Darker chime and drum music)
Right away, they were asking me
the most basic questions that showed
their lack of understanding related to the topic.
They had no actual clue what they just approved.
So, if we actually have the state adopt a cryptocurrency,
we will implement limits, coded into the blockchain.
And we will bring this transparency
in front of everyone's eyes.
So basically we could watch live, how the government
would be able to move money,
how much money the government will be moving,
and bring that transparency to a very corrupt system.
I call out my all my employees,
I call out all my investors,
tell them, we are stopping everything.
We have an opportunity to change our country,
and we were trying to do it very,
very quick before the state would be able to stop it.
(Intense, upbeat music)
(Ruffling page turn)
(Darker, more intense music)
The Ministry of Finance threatened to disappear me,
because I wasn't giving them the white paper.
And the very last night before
the release of the Petro, they
called the guards to point at us with guns,
forcing us to keep giving them the documentation
on everything that we had.
And after that, they removed my authorship.
So they basically stole the project.
I was declared an enemy of the state.
(Intense music)
The project failed.
I failed.
I failed to my investors, to my coworkers, to my family,
to everyone.
But it was a spearhead.
It gave the opportunity to this regularization of the
crypto industry within the country.
And that was a positive impact.
You saw billboards of different exchanges,
POS systems, cell phones with wallets integrated.
So we break the glass.
I learned from my failures, and I have now way more reasons to
try harder, and to bring more people to believing
that we the entrepreneurs, the innovators,
can change our country.
(Intense darker and mysterious music)