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The Venezuelan exchange Criptolago has recently announced that it will launch a text message based payment system which can process transactions in Venezuela’s oil-backed Petro (PTR) coin, the altcoin news today show.

This new system may expose new segments of Venezuela’s population to cryptocurrencies amid the country’s ongoing hyperinflation crisis. The value of the Venezuelan bolivar, for instance, has been fluctuating by 1.58% in the past 24 hours and roughly 2,500% in 12 months.

A tweet published on April 6 shows that the Venezuelan exchange Criptolago said that it developed the service to a call from the president of the country, Nicolas Maduro, urging the financial companies to develop payment platforms parallel to the Venezuelan banking system that can process Petro transfers.

“Following the guidelines of our president @NicolasMaduro and in favor of our #criptonation, with the new function of Payments for #SMS we have opened the possibility for all the Venezuelan people to carry out #Petro transactions in a very practical way,” they said.

The SMS-based payments system is also said to process offline transactions in all crypto assets that are supported on the Venezuelan exchange. Practically, this means that Venezuelans can now transfer Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), Dash (DASH), Venezuela’s bolivar coins and the proprietary token of the Venezuelan “investment cryptobank” Glufco without an Internet connection.

Currently, around 30% of the population in Venezuela is unable to access the Internet. This is why the Criptolago SMS-based payments system will likely enable new segments of the population to engage with cryptocurrencies. This service is exclusively available to registered users.

Right now, the cryptonews show that Venezuela is already the dominant source of volume on other offline crypto payment platforms. The country is representing 95% of the transactions using DashText since May 2019.

Despite the efforts from the president of the country Nicolas Maduro to mandate the use of PTR as a means of exchange in the country, an apparent uncertainty in the market makes the instrument unsuited for use as a currency.

As data from the local crypto news site Morocotacoin shows, on April 6th PTR was trading for $23 on Criptolago and $11.5 on AmberesCoin, while the official sources in the country claimed that the price of the coin is above $50.