From Investopedia:
Petrodollars are U.S. dollars paid to an oil exporting country for the sale of the commodity. Put simply, the petrodollar system is an exchange of oil for U.S. dollars between countries that buy oil and those that produce it.
The petrodollar was the result of the oil crisis in the mid-1970s when prices spiked to record levels. It helped increase the stability of oil prices denominated in U.S. dollars. The term regained notoriety in the early part of the 2000s when oil prices rose once again...
With the decline in the purchasing power of the greenback, some nations started to debate the benefits of the petrodollar system. Countries like Iran, Russia, and India have considered shifting the base value of their exports in their own currency rather than the U.S. dollar.
In late 2017, China announced that it considered moving to price oil in the yuan. Because it is the world's biggest importer of oil, China saw it as a logical shift to price the world's most important commodity.
[Important: Venezuela dropped the petrodollar in 2017 and began pricing oil in euros and the yuan.]
We did some Google searches to see if other marketplaces or exchanges existed where traders can utilize bitcoin to buy and sell oil futures. It was during this process that we first happened on Bitcoin Oil, a new fork out of Switzerland. Bitcoin Oil, symbol BTCO, is an attempt to correct perceived flaws in the Bitcoin protocol. Forks happen all the time most famous is probably the Bitcoin Cash fork. Like Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Oil aims to piggyback on the name recognition of the largest cryptocurrency to advance its mission. But it has nothing to do with oil. Its a double marketing whammy- combining the name Bitcoin and Oil to increase awareness. Moving on.
The most (in)famous crossover between the crypto & oil markets is the abandoned Petro Cryptocurrency promoted by embattled Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. The Petro was marketed as a cryptocurrency backed by the country's substantial oil reserve and would deliver oil upon contract expiration. Aside from the United States' banning it's citizens from participating in trading Petros, it also appears this was the VZ government's way of using global ICO hype to market vaporware (a product that by & large does not exist beyond a press release), with Russia's help.
With today's launch of BAKKT, institutions can finally participate in physically settled Bitcoin futures. While some industry observers were less than impressed by the first day's modest trading volume, many others are optimistic about the presence of a regulated, reliable on-ramp for large institutions to gain exposure to Bitcoin.
Understanding that Bitcoin Oil has nothing to do with oil, and the Petro was a scam that never got off the ground, we're left to wonder if there are laws against using to Bitcoin to invest in the upcoming Aramco IPO? Stay tuned for updates, the folks at Sunset Nice have a way of finding out these answers first.