You know, it’s hard to know where to start when it comes to lampooning this crazy thing, but suffice to say that Venezuela has finally launched its own cryptocurrency (“the petro”), a desperate move to try and capitalize off the global crypto craze on the way to staving off economic catastrophe.

This boondoggle has been in the works for months and we profiled it back in early December. For those interested in the backstory you can read it here.

Last night, Maduro announced that the government was set to publish “the manual for acquiring and commercializing the petro cryptocurrency” at midnight.  

Here he is, dressed in his favorite Sopranos-style track suit, announcing the publication of the manual:

That guy to his left is VP Tareck El Aissami, the OFAC-designated drug trafficker, who Maduro hilariously put in charge of restructuring the nation’s debt late last year, an effort that culminated in a literal pancake breakfastat Palacio Blanco.

El Aissami was in charge of publishing the petro manual because why the fuck not, right? There’s something that just seems “right” about a known blow trafficker publishing the bible for a cryptocurrency.

Last week, Venezuela’s “crypto superintendent” Carlos Vargas claimed the country will get investments from Turkey, Qatar, the U.S. and Europe. Ok, Carlos.

Obviously no one takes this seriously. This is Maduro trying to figure out a way around U.S. sanctions and keep the country from imploding entirely at a time when hyperinflation is driving the cost of a cup of coffee up at an annualized 448,000%:

“Venezuela has been known for misappropriation of assets in the past and the central bank has just created hyperinflation so I imagine there’ll be trust and transparency issues [with the petro]”, Harry Colvin, director and senior economist at Longview Economics, told CNBC ahead of the cryptocurrency’s launch.