100 Bs.F banknotes totaling 1.5 billion Bs.F on its Brazilian border that had not yet been circulated. According to a US Department of Defense adviser linked to The Pentagon, the 1.5 billion Bs.F was printed by Venezuela and destined for Bolivia, since unlike the implied exchange rate of thousands of Bs.F per USD, the exchange rate was approximately 10 Bs.F per USD, making the value of the stash 419 times stronger, from US$358,000 to US$150 million. The adviser further stated that the Venezuelan government tried to send the newly printed notes to be exchanged by the Bolivian government, so Bolivia could pay 20% of its debt to Venezuela, and so Venezuela could use the US dollars for its own disposal. Petro cryptocurrency In December 2017, President Maduro announced that Venezuela would introduce a state cryptocurrency called the 'Petro' in an attempt to shore up its struggling economy. This new cryptocurrency would be backed by Venezuela's reserves of oil, gasoline, gold, and diamonds. Maduro stated that the Petro would allow Venezuela to "advance in issues of monetary sovereignty", and that it would make "new forms of international financing" available to the country. Opposition leaders, however, expressed doubt due to Venezuela's economic turmoil, pointing to the falling value of the Venezuelan bolívar, its fiat currency, and $140 billion in foreign debt. In January 2018, as a response to the petro, Venezuela's National Assembly, headed by the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable, declared the petro to be an illegal debt issuance by a government desperate for cash, and said it would not recognize it. On the same month, Maduro announced that Venezuela would issue 100 million tokens of the petro, which would put the value of the entire issuance at just over $6 billion. It also established a cryptocurrency government advisory group called VIBE to act as "an institutional, political and legal base" from which to launch the petro. In March 2018, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order prohibiting transactions in any Venezuelan government-issued cryptocurrency by any US citizen or any person within the US, effective on 19 March, after claiming that the cryptocurrency was designed to obfuscate US sanctions and access international financing. In August 2018, the bolívar soberano had a fixed exchange rate of 3,600 Bs.S per Petro. The Petro was supposedly tied to the price of a barrel of oil (about US$60 in August 2018). As of late-August 2018,