- Part of the transfers goes to Russia
- Stablecoins also help businesses protect themselves from inflation.
Companies in Venezuela are using the USDT stablecoin as a way to circumvent sanctions and make payments with foreign partners. This figured out Chainalysis analysts.
“34% of all small retail transactions in Venezuela were in stablecoins. This is more than in any other country in Latin America.” — emphasized in the report.
But they clarify that more often than not, firms convert local currency into USDT for a different reason – to protect their capital from devaluation.
Oil for cryptocurrency
Some companies in Venezuela receive payments from partners located in Asia and Russia. This is especially true for petroleum products.
Venezuela has been implementing cryptocurrencies to circumvent sanctions since 2019. Then the state oil company PDVSA offered to accept bitcoin and ether.
In October, the US Department of Justice arrested five Russian citizens and two oil brokers who used black schemes to trade oil and weapons. These trades involved payments in USDT. The accusatory documents state that Russia and Venezuela made at least one sale of 500,000 million barrels of oil through stablecoins from Tether.
Cryptocurrencies partially allow Russians to circumvent sanctions. But this technology helps our country even more. Today it became known that during the year of the war, Ukraine raised $70 million in cryptocurrency.
