Key Takeaways
- Venezuelan Binance P2P volumes hit $1.4B in a month, proving crypto is a primary currency exchange channel.
- This massive USDT volume equaled 88% of central bank forex sales, exposing traditional market limitations.
- Easing US sanctions will boost traditional forex sales, expected to lower future Binance trading volumes.
USDT Trading Hits Record Levels In Venezuela
While Venezuela has been a pioneer in cryptocurrency and stablecoin adoption, recent reports indicate that stablecoin trading volumes, specifically for USDT, have grown exponentially over the last month.
Alejandro Grisanti, Director and Founding Partner at Ecoanalitica, an economic consulting firm, announced that they had developed a new methodology to estimate the true size of Binance’s national peer-to-peer (P2P) market, stressing that the findings were remarkable.
According to Ecoanalitica’s estimates, P2P trading volumes on Binance, Venezuela’s most popular crypto platform, reached USDT 1.389 billion between June 11 and July 13, an average of nearly USDT 44 million per day.
Grisanti highlighted that these numbers prove Binance “has moved beyond being a niche market to become one of the country’s primary channels for buying and selling currency, reflecting the ongoing limitations of the traditional foreign exchange market.”
The volumes are relevant, as they represent 88% of all foreign currency sales executed by the central bank in June and 75% of the country’s monthly total oil exports.
In September, former Econalitica partner Adrubal Oliveros revealed that the Venezuelan forex market had pivoted toward the crypto system and stablecoins as the government faced crippling U.S. unilateral sanctions, taking advantage of the crypto payments received to settle oil sales.
Nonetheless, after the capture operation of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro was executed in January, the Trump Administration has been progressively lifting sanctions, prompting a mild recovery of the formal forex sales market where the Venezuelan government is the main provider.
Grisanti highlighted that this is expected to change in the coming months, as the increase in dollar volumes offered by the central bank and reduced market segmentation should empower the traditional forex market again.
“If the exchange ‘normalization’ process that we have been observing continues, we expect that the volume traded on Binance will gradually decrease, not because the demand for currencies falls, but because a greater part of these operations can be carried out through traditional banking,” he concluded.