Tether is setting a new milestone in Latin America. The issuer of USDT has announced an investment in the seed funding round of EFY Finance, a fintech specialising in financial infrastructure. The stated aim: to develop business uses of USDT and USAT by connecting these digital dollars to bank accounts and local payment networks. The amount committed has not been disclosed, reports Journal du Coin.

A useful clarification: this is a stake in a fundraising round, not a product launch or a commercial partnership announced as such. Tether is investing in a young company whose business serves its own strategy.

What EFY Finance does

According to the press release cited by Journal du Coin, EFY offers cross-border payments, accounts and digital asset custody services. Its offering also covers conversion between traditional currencies and stablecoins, over-the-counter transactions, wallets and cards.

The fintech claims more than 25,000 active accounts, individuals and businesses combined, and settlements to local accounts in 17 countries, again according to the same source. It holds a digital asset service provider licence in El Salvador and has a presence in Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, Panama and Ecuador. For Tether, this network serves as a foothold to push institutional use of its two stablecoins.

The real bottleneck: getting out to the local account

The choice of EFY is far from trivial. For a company, sending tokens only settles part of the payment. The funds still have to be converted, the beneficiary identified, the transaction documented, and the recipient enabled to receive a currency usable in their local account.

In other words, a lightning-fast transfer on the blockchain does not guarantee an equally fast complete settlement. Delays and costs depend on the intermediaries, checks and conversions required, Journal du Coin points out. It is precisely this link between crypto and banking services that EFY claims to streamline, and that is where Tether is placing its bet.

The logic holds for a stablecoin issuer: a token that circulates well but converts poorly remains confined to exchanges. To make its way into the treasury of an SME paying a supplier or collecting from a customer, it needs accounts, compliance and reliable bridges to the local currency.

A region already used to digital dollars

This is not uncharted territory. Chainalysis’s 2024 report, cited by Journal du Coin, estimated that Latin America had received nearly $415 billion in cryptocurrencies between July 2023 and June 2024, or 9.1% of the global activity studied. Argentina came first with $91.1 billion, ahead of Brazil and its $90.3 billion.

Over the same period, again according to Chainalysis, stablecoins accounted for 61.8% of crypto transaction volume in Argentina, compared with 44.7% globally. The analytics firm linked this demand in particular to the search for protection against inflation and currency depreciation, and noted the weight of cross-border payments between businesses in Brazil.

A caveat is in order: these figures are a historical benchmark, not a measure of the market in 2026. They nonetheless show why an issuer like Tether is looking to this region to broaden the practical uses of its tokens.

Key takeaways

The deal says more about Tether’s strategy than about EFY itself. The issuer is seeking to broaden the use of its stablecoins in companies’ day-to-day operations: collecting, converting and settling funds reliably. For Swiss companies trading with Latin America, the move is worth following, without prejudging what comes next: the amount remains unknown, and EFY’s future volumes are not published.

Sources

  • Journal du Coin: “Stablecoins: Tether invests in EFY Finance to accelerate payments in Latin America”