Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA is now routing close to 80% of its crude oil revenue through stablecoins, mainly Tether’s USDT, according to prominent economist Asdrúbal Oliveros in a recent appearance on the Venezuelan economics podcast “Tertulia y Dinero,” later summarized by local outlet Bitcoinsensus and picked up by multiple crypto media.
Oliveros framed the shift as a direct response to tightening U.S. financial pressure on Caracas. The economist said on the show, linked by Bitcoinsensus and originally reported by Bitcoin.com, that oil payments now arrive overwhelmingly in crypto rather than through traditional dollar rails.
“Casi el 80% de los ingresos petroleros se están recaudando en criptomonedas, en stablecoins.”
USDT itself barely reacted. The token held its peg near $1, trading around $0.9996 with effectively zero move over the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. The story here is not price. It is scale and counterparty risk.
From fringe experiment to default settlement rail
The 80% figure marks the first time a well known local economist has put a number on PDVSA’s crypto exposure. It builds on a trail of reporting that showed PDVSA’s gradual move into USDT but stopped short of quantifying it.
Back in April 2024, Reuters reported that PDVSA “had been slowly moving oil sales to USDT” and by the end of the first quarter had shifted many spot deals to contracts that demanded prepayment for half of each cargo in USDT, while forcing new customers to hold crypto in digital wallets.[Reuters] That piece already described traders struggling with compliance checks and resorting to intermediaries to keep buying Venezuelan crude.
By mid 2025, Reuters again noted that Caracas had started to allow selected banks and exchanges to sell USDT to private companies through government approved wallets, with an estimated $119 million in crypto sold to the private sector in July alone.[Reuters] Local site Curadas, summarizing the same Tertulia y Dinero cycle in December, went further and described “~78–80% de exportaciones petroleras (PDVSA) en USDT”, treating stablecoin settlement as the norm rather than the exception for oil exports.
Until Oliveros’ on air remark, those reports showed direction but not magnitude. His “almost 80%” line now gives traders and policymakers a working number for how deeply USDT has penetrated Venezuela’s most important export stream, even though PDVSA and the Venezuelan state have not published any breakdown.
Sanctions, tariffs and a new oil payment stack
The stablecoin pivot did not happen in a vacuum. The U.S. Treasury reimposed oil sanctions on Venezuela in April 2024, letting a key general license lapse and telling PDVSA’s customers to wind down transactions by May 31, a move that forced firms back into case by case approvals.[Reuters] PDVSA accelerated USDT invoicing precisely as those permissions tightened.
In March 2025, the White House layered on a new tool. Executive Order 14245 imposed a 25% tariff on all goods imported into the United States from any country that imports Venezuelan oil, raising the cost of doing business with Caracas even for non U.S. counterparties.[White House] Since November, a U.S. naval crackdown has escalated further. Reuters has reported multiple tanker seizures and interceptions near Venezuela and warned that the blockade is squeezing both dollar and crypto inflows that normally arrive via oil trade.[Reuters][Reuters]
That backdrop explains why PDVSA now leans so heavily on stablecoins. Offshore intermediaries can receive USDT from Chinese or other Asian buyers, net out their cut, and pass balances into wallets that the Venezuelan state controls. An analysis of Venezuelan flows by regional researchers and UCAB Blockchain Academy head Aníbal Garrido, cited by several regional outlets, described USDT payments routed through Asian middlemen as a core part of the country’s current oil revenue chain.[news.cryptos.com]
The bottleneck: turning USDT into working capital
Oliveros also stressed that stablecoins do not solve everything. They shift the choke point. Instead of correspondent banks freezing dollars, the problem becomes how to off‑ramp a sanctioned sovereign’s USDT holdings into usable fiat without touching institutions under U.S. jurisdiction.
In the same Tertulia y Dinero appearance, he described a growing “bottleneck in the foreign exchange market” because crypto based oil revenue cannot be converted fast enough, which pressures the exchange rate and feeds local inflation. Cryptopolitan’s summary of his comments highlighted this tension and repeated the 80% figure, while noting that annual oil revenue now exceeds $12 billion and mostly comes from China.[Cryptopolitan]
Curadas’ December explainer on USDT in Venezuela echoed the same point. The outlet wrote that around 80% of PDVSA liquidations now arrive in USDT, which then flood the corporate FX market as firms scramble to convert those tokens into dollars for imports.[Curadas] Reuters has separately reported that the supply of foreign currency, including crypto, has already dropped as the U.S. blockade bites, and warned that devaluation is feeding through quickly to prices.[Reuters]
Tether sits in the crosshairs
This entire structure depends on a centralized issuer that faces its own Western regulatory pressure. Tether told Reuters in April 2024 that it respects the U.S. Treasury’s sanctions list and is “committed to working to ensure sanction addresses are frozen promptly.”[Reuters] After Reuters exposed PDVSA’s growing use of USDT for oil exports, Tether repeated that stance to Cointelegraph and pledged to freeze assets linked to OFAC‑sanctioned entities.
The Atlantic Council later noted that by 2024 Tether had already frozen forty‑one wallets involved in attempts to use USDT to evade sanctions on Venezuelan oil.[Atlantic Council] That history shows that U.S. policymakers already see Venezuela’s USDT pipeline as a live sanctions issue, not a blind spot.
The result is a striking setup. A sanctions‑hit petro state now collects what a leading local economist describes as “almost 80%” of its oil revenue in a U.S. dollar stablecoin, while the issuer of that token works with U.S. authorities and has a track record of freezing addresses tied to that same trade. Traders who route crude through this system now carry not only sanctions and tanker risk but also issuer freeze risk on their working capital.
One more caveat matters. The 80% share comes from Oliveros’ public estimate, amplified by outlets such as Bitcoinsensus, Curadas and Cryptopolitan.[Bitcoinsensus][Curadas][Cryptopolitan] PDVSA does not publish real time settlement data, and no multilateral body has released audited figures. What we can verify from primary reporting is the direction of travel. PDVSA has hard‑wired USDT into its oil contracts. Caracas has opened domestic channels to redistribute that flow. U.S. sanctions now meet Tether’s freeze button in the middle.
