Bolivia Weighs Recognizing Tether USDT as Payment Currency Amid Dollar Shortage

USDT News

Bolivia is moving to recognize Tether’s Tether USDT (USDT) as a legal payment currency, a step driven by a prolonged shortage of US dollars. Economy and Public Finance Minister Jose Gabriel Espinoza said a draft framework would let USDT circulate alongside the boliviano and the dollar for payments and savings. The proposal remains under review and would carry anti-money-laundering safeguards, since Bolivia sits on the Financial Action Task Force gray list. The move follows the 2024 reversal of the country’s crypto ban and the new administration’s pledge to widen access to digital-asset services as reserve pressure forces demand toward dollar-denominated alternatives.

The Bolivian push echoes a broader emerging-market pattern where USDT functions less as a transfer rail and more as a gateway to scarce dollars. After the government abandoned its long-standing currency peg earlier this year, the gap between official and parallel exchange rates widened sharply, pushing households and businesses toward stablecoins. Officials frame the framework as a way to formalize activity already happening informally, capturing transactions inside a regulated perimeter. The initiative signals how monetary instability, rather than speculative appetite, is fueling stablecoin adoption across Latin America, positioning USDT as a practical unit of account where the banking system cannot reliably supply hard currency.

Venezuela offers the clearest picture of how deep that reliance can run. On-chain and market data covering the June 11 to July 13 window show peer-to-peer USDT volume on the country’s most popular trading platform reached roughly 1.389 billion dollars, averaging close to 44 million dollars a day. Those figures equal about 88% of the central bank’s total foreign-exchange sales for June and around 75% of the nation’s oil exports for the month. Analysts describe the shift as evidence that stablecoins have moved beyond a niche tool to become one of the primary channels for buying and selling currency, exposing the persistent limits of the traditional forex market under sanctions pressure.

That dominance may prove cyclical rather than permanent. The gradual easing of US sanctions since January has begun to revive formal foreign-exchange sales, with the government supplying more dollars directly through official channels. Economists tracking the market expect peer-to-peer volumes to soften in the months ahead, not because demand for currency falls, but because a larger share of transactions can migrate back to conventional banking rails as market fragmentation eases. The trajectory underscores a key dynamic for USDT: its transactional footprint in stressed economies can expand rapidly when official liquidity dries up and contract just as quickly when hard-currency access normalizes.

Tether’s influence also extends into equities tied to the mining sector, where the company recently trimmed its stake in a Bitcoin miner following an AI-driven rally. Investors are now scrutinizing insider stock sales at miners pivoting toward AI infrastructure, with executives at TeraWulf, Cipher Digital, Riot Platforms and Core Scientific disclosing sales, many under prearranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plans. The TEM AI Infrastructure Growth Index has fallen 16% over the past month, cooling enthusiasm for the pivot narrative. Governance concerns have taken center stage as shareholders question whether the benefits of strategic repositioning will flow to public investors rather than insiders cashing out near local highs.

The broader mining reshuffle continues to reshape balance sheets. CleanSpark shares climbed after the company signed a data-center lease valued at roughly 6.6 billion dollars, accelerating its own move into AI compute capacity. Separately, Bitmine reported stronger staking revenue as it diversifies income beyond block rewards. The through-line connecting these developments to USDT is capital rotation: as miners chase AI-linked cash flows and strategic backers like Tether rebalance their positions, stablecoin issuers remain deeply embedded in the equity and liquidity plumbing of the digital-asset industry, extending their reach well past simple dollar-pegged transfers into corporate treasury and infrastructure financing.

COINOTAG’s proprietary 42-indicator composite scoring engine currently returns no active support or resistance mapping for USDT, consistent with a fully collateralized stablecoin designed to hold a fixed one-dollar peg rather than trend as an altcoin. With spot price, RSI and MACD reading neutral by design, our engine treats USDT as a stability instrument, so directional derivatives signals are not the relevant lens. The broader tape is cautious: our aggregate market data shows a Fear and Greed reading of 27/100 (Fear), Bitcoin dominance at 69.8% and total crypto market capitalization near 1.84 trillion dollars. In risk-off phases like this, stablecoin demand typically strengthens as capital parks in dollar proxies; a sustained peg deviation below one dollar would be the only signal that would invalidate that thesis.