With U.S. economic sanctions on Venezuela taking effect, Adobe discontinued its Creative Cloud (CC) subscription service in the country, stranding thousands of creators without their creative apps. Adobe switched to SaaS-only in several markets and the only legal way for creators to use popular Adobe apps such as Photoshop, Premier, Acrobat, Lightroom, and Illustrator, is through CC. Much like Steam, CC is a DRM platform that lets you subscribe to Adobe apps on monthly or annual payment plans, and provides you with the latest versions of the apps, with regular updates. You also get access to cloud-storage an asset library, and a social network of creators.

Adobe's exit from Venezuela isn't sudden, the company has given Venezuelan creators until October 28th to download any content stored on their accounts. From October 29th, Adobe's servers will longer respond to requests from Venezuela. This also means Creative Cloud apps will break. CC authenticates users by dialing home each time an app is launched. If a user is falling behind on subscription payments or if the app can't reach Adobe servers, they are usually given a 14-day grace period before the app stops working. Executive Order 13884 signed by President Trump strips Venezuela of all U.S. businesses, which would include payment processors such as Visa and MasterCard.

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.