Tether Invests In Bolivian Fintech Peso To Expand USDT Payments

TL;DR: Tether says it led Peso’s pre-seed round to expand USDT payment infrastructure in Latin America. The announcement emphasizes local bank connections and merchant payments, without disclosing the investment amount.

Tether’s latest investment is aimed at the point where a dollar token becomes useful for buying lunch, paying a merchant or moving money into a local bank account.

The USDT issuer announced on October 21 that it led a pre-seed funding round in Peso, a Bolivian financial-technology company. Financial terms were not disclosed in the announcement.

Peso’s products include USDT accounts, point-of-sale acceptance and virtual accounts connecting to Bolivia’s banking system through QR and ACH payment arrangements, according to Tether. The company also describes an integration enabling food orders paid in USDT through Yango in Bolivia.

Funding is intended to expand local on- and off-ramps in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Argentina, as well as merchant and account infrastructure.

Moving a stablecoin between blockchain addresses is only one part of a usable payment service. A customer may earn local currency, hold a dollar balance and pay a business that wants its proceeds in a bank account.

Connecting those steps determines whether the token works as spending money or remains an asset the customer must repeatedly convert and transfer. It also determines where costs appear: a cheap blockchain transaction does not guarantee an inexpensive conversion or withdrawal.

The announcement puts Peso’s local connections at the center of the investment case. That is a more specific proposition than simply adding another wallet capable of holding USDT.

However, product availability and commercial adoption are different measures. The funding release does not establish how frequently customers use the described services, how much merchants process through them or the all-in cost of a typical payment.

Those operating figures would show whether the investment is translating into routine spending. For now, Tether has disclosed a commitment to a payments provider and identified the infrastructure it wants that provider to expand.

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This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.