Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA is now routing a large share of its crude export payments through Tether’s USDT stablecoin as Washington tightens sanctions and intercepts tankers off its coast. A recent report on Bitcoin.com claims PDVSA already collects about 80% of its oil sales revenue in USDT, a figure PDVSA and public filings have not confirmed but that fits with how the trade has evolved over the past two years.
Reuters first detailed the crypto pivot in April 2024, reporting that PDVSA had shifted many spot crude and fuel deals to contracts that require buyers to prepay half of each cargo in USDT after the U.S. Treasury let a key oil waiver lapse on 31 May that year. The investigation described PDVSA forcing new customers to hold crypto wallets and enforcing USDT terms even on some older contracts, in order to keep funds out of banks that sit in the reach of U.S. courts.
What 80% would mean in hard dollars
Hard numbers on PDVSA’s crypto usage remain scarce. The company has not published full annual accounts since 2016, and it only resurfaced with a partial 2024 results document that Reuters viewed this year. That document put PDVSA’s oil sales abroad in 2024 at 17.52 billion dollars. If the 80% ratio were accurate for that revenue base, roughly 14 billion dollars of flows would now route through USDT rather than traditional bank rails.
For Tether, those sums are material but not dominant. USDT trades today around 0.9997 dollars with a market cap near 186.8 billion dollars, according to CoinGecko data. A Venezuelan share of about 14 billion dollars would amount to less than 8% of the token’s current supply, but it would sit firmly in the category of real economy flows rather than exchange recycling.
The receipts: PDVSA already demands USDT from buyers
The on-the-record evidence shows a steady march into stablecoins. In the April 2024 piece, Reuters quoted Venezuelan oil minister Pedro Tellechea saying PDVSA used different currencies across contracts and that some now prefer digital payments. The same report described how trading houses balked at direct exposure to PDVSA wallets and pushed transactions through intermediaries instead.
USDT transactions, as PDVSA is demanding them, ‘do not pass any trader’s compliance department,’ one trader told Reuters, so counterparties rely on middlemen instead.
By September 2025, a separate Reuters report on Venezuela’s currency market noted that PDVSA had ‘since last year been slowly increasing its digital currency usage and moving sales to USDT’ while the government allowed more USDT into formal currency exchanges as Chevron’s restricted license cut dollar inflows. That piece also described banks selling USDT directly to vetted businesses that then used it to pay domestic and foreign suppliers.
Tankers seized, buyers in Asia, and why crypto share keeps rising
The pressure around these flows increased sharply this month. On 12 December, AFP reported that the United States seized a Cuba-bound tanker carrying between 1.1 and 1.9 million barrels of Venezuelan crude and then moved to sanction six more vessels that ship the country’s oil. The same story estimated that China now buys around 80% of Venezuelan production and that many buyers pay with cryptocurrency, mainly USDT, to avoid the banking system. AFP framed the seizures as a direct threat to President Nicolás Maduro’s ability to keep imports and patronage flowing.
On 22 December, Reuters reported that U.S. forces had intercepted another Venezuelan tanker in international waters and that President Trump had ordered a ‘total and complete’ blockade of sanctioned Venezuelan oil shipments. Oil prices jumped on the news as analysts warned that tougher enforcement would push more Venezuelan barrels deeper into opaque channels that already clear in crypto.
That enforcement backdrop makes the Bitcoin.com claim of an 80% USDT share directionally credible even if the exact figure remains unverified. PDVSA has clear incentives to move as much revenue as possible into instruments that never touch correspondent banks subject to U.S. jurisdiction.
Tron rails sit under Venezuela’s digital dollars
While PDVSA has not disclosed which chains it uses, retail and small business flows in Venezuela already run mainly through Tron. Cointelegraph recently described how merchants across Caracas post prices in dollars but settle in USDT at Binance P2P rates, with most transfers executed as TRC-20 transactions to Tron addresses. The report called USDT ‘Binance dollars’ and noted that stablecoins dominate small payments, mostly via TRC-20.
As those retail balances accumulate, they sit on a chain whose native token, TRX, trades today around 0.2856 dollars with a market cap near 27.0 billion dollars, again per CoinGecko. In practice Tron already clears remittances and household payments for Venezuelans who earn or receive USDT, so oil-linked inflows that filter into the domestic economy often end up on TRC-20 rails too.
Tether’s compliance promise hangs over PDVSA’s strategy
The crypto workaround is not censorship resistant. Tether has repeatedly told the market that it respects the U.S. Treasury’s sanctions list and that it will freeze wallets tied to entities on the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s SDN roster. In April 2024, after reports that PDVSA used USDT to finance oil trades, Tether told CoinDesk that it would freeze Venezuelan assets that violated OFAC sanctions, a stance later summarized in a CoinGlass recap of Tether’s freezes. Those statements sit uneasily next to claims that a sanctioned state company now runs most of its revenue through USDT.
Tether, Tron and analytics firm TRM Labs also announced a joint Financial Crimes Unit that froze 126 million dollars of USDT in 2024 across various investigations, according to CoinGlass. The same summary noted that Tether had already blacklisted hundreds of millions of dollars of USDT in prior years, reinforcing that Venezuela’s crypto lifeline runs through actors that cooperate closely with U.S. law enforcement.
What traders should watch next
For now USDT continues to hold its peg near 1.00 dollar and move tens of billions of dollars in trading volume each day, while TRX trades a little below 0.29 dollars with modest weekly gains. The market has not priced in a sudden cut-off of Venezuelan flows. The real risk sits in the intersection of three moving parts: tighter U.S. tanker enforcement, OFAC pressure on Tether to trace and freeze PDVSA-linked wallets, and future decisions by Tron infrastructure if those wallets sit heavily on TRC-20.
