On May 5, Venezuela's government announced that its controversial oil-backed cryptocurrency, El Petro, would go offline for maintenance until May ten.

However, observers have since identified that the official Petro block explorer at present lists May five, 2022, equally the appointment that its genesis block was mined.

Other cake explorers tape Oct.thirteen, 2022, as the date for Petro's genesis cake — suggesting that in that location is more than than one Petro concatenation currently in existence.

Petro suspected of quietly forking

Later the maintenance was completed, the National Superintendency of Cryptoassets announced it had completed major infrastructure upgrades necessitating that PetroApp users update their Petro wallet addresses in order to proceed using the platform.

The extreme hyperinflation suffered in Venezuela has long driven demand for Bitcoin (BTC) in the country — with Venezuela hosting amidst the strongest peer-to-peer trading volumes worldwide.

Crypto adoption grows among Venezuelan merchants

Earlier this month, Panama-based crypto payments firm, Cryptobuyer, announced a partnership with local company, Mega Soft, to enable support for crypto payments across 20,000 retailers in Venezuela.

The deal will come across Mega Soft, a firm that develops payment processing solutions, launch support for cryptocurrencies on its Merchant Server platform — spanning more than than 20,000 businesses including pharmaceuticals network Farmatodo, supermarket chain Central Madeirense, and movie theater group Cines Unidos.

Mega Soft's merchants can now have payments in the grade of Bitcoin, Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin, (LTC), Nuance (DASH), Binance Coin (BNB), Cryptobuyers native XPT token, and stablecoins Tether (USDT) and Dai (DAI).

The partnership does not contain Cryptobuyer's first foray into Venezuela, having previously partnered with the country's largest retail concatenation Traki. The Panama-based firm besides collaborated with Venezuelan hotel concatenation Tamaco in March, and inked a bargain with Burger Rex to back up at 40 locations across the country in January.