Venezuela’s Bimonetary Plan Leaves Out the Currency People Actually Use

A group of Venezuelan economists has proposed formalizing a bimonetary system that would give the US dollar official standing alongside the bolívar in the country’s economy. The plan, unveiled on September 12, 2026, notably makes no mention of USDT, the dollar-pegged stablecoin that has become a de facto medium of exchange for millions of Venezuelans navigating years of currency turmoil.

The omission matters because it exposes a widening gap between policy proposals crafted in academic and institutional circles and the transactional reality on the ground. While economists debate how to legally recognize physical dollars circulating in Venezuela, ordinary citizens and small businesses have already moved past that debate, settling invoices, paying salaries, and saving value in USDT through mobile wallets and peer-to-peer exchanges.

A Country That Improvised Its Own Dollarization

Venezuela’s path to informal dollarization did not start with a policy paper. It began with hyperinflation that shredded the bolívar’s purchasing power and eroded trust in the national currency to a degree few economies have experienced in peacetime. As banknotes lost value by the week, first physical dollars and later dollar-pegged stablecoins filled the void left by a collapsing monetary system.

USDT, issued on multiple blockchains and accessible through smartphone apps, offered something physical dollars could not: portability, divisibility, and relative ease of transfer in an economy where cash dollars are often scarce and banking access is limited. For many Venezuelans, converting bolívars into USDT became less a speculative bet on crypto and more a practical hedge against a currency that could lose double-digit percentages of its value in a matter of weeks.

This is not a uniquely Venezuelan phenomenon. Elsewhere in the world, financial institutions are moving to integrate stablecoins into mainstream payment rails rather than compete with them, as seen in how banks are working to lock in deposits with tokenized payments and stablecoins. Venezuela’s case is distinctive mainly in the scale and urgency with which citizens adopted dollar-pegged tokens out of necessity rather than convenience.

What the Bimonetary Proposal Misses

By focusing exclusively on the bolívar-dollar relationship, the proposed framework risks addressing a monetary reality that has already been partially superseded. Formalizing bimonetarism without accounting for USDT could mean that any resulting legal or regulatory structure fails to capture how a significant share of daily transactions actually occur.

This gap has several practical implications:

• Policy design based on incomplete data about the currencies actually circulating in the economy may misjudge the true level of dollarization already achieved informally.
• Businesses and individuals who rely on USDT for payroll, remittances, or commerce would continue operating in a regulatory gray zone even if the bolívar-dollar system is formalized.
• Financial oversight bodies could struggle to monitor or tax an already substantial volume of stablecoin-denominated activity that sits outside any bimonetary framework.
• Any future attempt to bring stablecoins into a formal system would have to be retrofitted onto rules originally built without them in mind.

None of this is necessarily a criticism of the economists’ technical work on the bolívar-dollar relationship, which addresses real and long-standing distortions in Venezuela’s official exchange mechanisms. But it does suggest that policy conversations are lagging behind the informal financial infrastructure that ordinary Venezuelans have already built for themselves using dollar-pegged tokens.

What to Watch Next

Several developments will indicate whether this gap narrows or widens in the months ahead. Observers should watch whether subsequent versions of the bimonetary proposal are revised to explicitly address stablecoin usage, or whether separate regulatory efforts emerge to govern USDT and similar tokens independently of the bolívar-dollar debate.

It is also worth monitoring whether Venezuelan authorities issue any formal guidance on how businesses should treat USDT-denominated transactions for accounting, taxation, or contractual purposes. The absence of such guidance so far has not stopped adoption, but it does leave both individuals and companies operating without clear legal footing.

Security and custody practices among everyday users also deserve attention, particularly as reliance on mobile wallets grows in an environment with limited institutional oversight; the discovery elsewhere of vulnerabilities in dozens of iOS crypto wallet apps is a reminder that informal dollarization through digital tokens carries its own technical risks alongside the regulatory ones. Whether Venezuela’s policymakers eventually treat USDT as a parallel currency worth regulating, or continue to sideline it in favor of a bolívar-dollar framework, will shape how effectively any new monetary architecture reflects the economy Venezuelans actually live in.

Source: CriptoNoticias

This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice.