1. Who is pushing the idea?
Venezuelas president, Nicolas Maduro, is pitching a proposed virtual currency he calls the Petro, each unit of which would be backed by one barrel of oil. According to Maduro, the country received $5 billion in purchase offers in the first week of presale in February.
Maduro is pushing petro to get away with the US led sanctions against them. Well, he says they raised tons of money, but I don't believed that is the case.
2. Which other countries are considering cryptocurrencies?
Russias central bank plans to talk to countries including Brazil, China, India and the five former Soviet republics about creating a supra-cryptocurrency that could cover countries with 40 percent of the worlds population. Peoples Bank of China Deputy Governor Fan Yifei wrote an article broaching the possibility of a digital currency it would issue with Chinese commercial institutions.
Again, this is totally wrong. Russia has no plans to adopt crypto currency. They already have cryptorubles which they created to satisfy Russian's population appetite for crypto. But I don't think it will be enough to swayed them.
I won't go into details because there is a lot of contradictions, flawed argument on this article. Short term, government going against crypto is bad for us. Long term effect, crypto is unstoppable not even Russia or China can stop this revolution.