Blockchain technologies will eventually change the world, eventually. Whether or not cryptocurrencies will be part of that world, however, is still up for debate. Venezuela, however, is looking to reap dividends from the current cryptocurrency craze before the final answer to that question has a chance of being answered. As the country has entered a severely crippled economic and civil state, the search for a way to raise government funds has led to the development of the petro cryptocurrency - which is linked, as one would expect, to the country's primary export and income source: oil.

As part of the petro pre-sale, investors were being offered $60 petro tokens at discounted rates that they can exchange for actual petros during a planned Mars ICO (Initial Coin Offering). After that ICO has been gone through, a petro will supposedly represent a barrel of crude from a specific division in the country's Orinoco oil belt. Is this a pre-buy for a barrel of crude of sorts? It seems so. It's also an extremely risky move for investors, though, but nothing that they aren't used to already: futures trading does exist, after all.

In what amounts (for now) to the biggest heist in the history of the world, Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck, which handles about 3% of the total cryptocurrency transactions, has apparently been on the receiving end of a $500 million hack to its crypto vaults. The heist, which seems to have particularly over the NEM cryptocurrency, took some $532 million worth of the cryptocurrency from the exchanges' coffers. This news comes after Coincheck halted all NEM transaction on its exchange starting this morning, without previous warning, which raised red flags on the NEM investor community and Coincheck users. Additionally, it's being reported that there was an additional $123 million worth of Ripple cryptocurrency taken, as well.

For now, Coincheck has only issued an update saying that "Depositing NEM on Coincheck is currently being restricted. Deposits made to your account will not be reflected in your balance, and we advise all users to refrain from making deposits until the restriction has been lifted", so, there's no confirmation of the heist as of now. However, Nikkei is reporting that Coincheck has reported the theft to the local Financial Services Agency and the police. If confirmed, this is easily the biggest heist in the world's history, and not coincidentally, the biggest in crypto history as well.