Stablecoin giant Tether recently announced that it had acquired a 70% stake in a South American agricultural firm Adecoagro for $600M. The NYSE listed company manages over 200,000 hectares across Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay on which agricultural products like corn, wheat, soybeans, rice, peanuts, cotton, milk, and sunflowers are cultivated. It also provides agricultural processing — turning raw outputs like milk and corn into ethanol and cheese and by-products into electricity which contribute over 1 million of renewable energy to the grid.

Why is the world’s largest stablecoin issuer buying controlling stakes in agriculture conglomerates? In a word, it’s part of a plan to cement USDT as the go-to currency for cross border trade and expand its footprint into the tokenisation of real world financial assets, mainly commodities in this case. With the acquisition, the company will now use USDT to reduce payment and settlement times for trade involving its commodities and across its supply chain from days to seconds. Renewable energy produced by the company will also be used to power Bitcoin mining operations, while commodities will become tokenised.

As I’ve written about previously, this is a clear sign that stablecoins like USDT aren’t just for crypto traders anymore. They are becoming the de facto dollar in emerging markets like LATAM, where over a third of consumers have made an everyday purchase in stablecoins.

At OpenTrade, we’re building for this new frontier in financial services. Today, millions of individuals and businesses in LATAM use USDT for spending, sending, receiving, and saving in a stable currency. While this a lifeline to people and businesses who have been subject to extreme currency volatility, capital controls, and inept (and sometimes corrupt) financial systems — it currently lacks a major feature; yield.

Traditional banks in the region offer little to no access to dollar banking services, while dollar yield is even harder to come by. Where it does exist, it’s only available to the wealthiest, is slow, costly, and very limited in the range of investment options available. This has pushed USDT holders to DeFi markets to earn yield on their digital dollars — but as I’ve written about previously — this is still far too complex, risky, and volatile for everyday users. These individuals and businesses want and need a safe, simple way to earn yield on their USDT and OpenTrade is delivering that.

Today, we’re providing stablecoin yield infrastructure that is enabling some of the largest FinTechs players in LATAM (like Littio, Belo, and Buenbit) to earn and deliver yield on USDT to their customers backed by a suite of real-world assets like money market funds, sovereign bonds, corporate bonds, trade finance, and private credit. USDT yield products powered by OpenTrade are white-labeled and embedded directly in the UX of the fintech apps and digital wallets they already use to manage their financial lives, enabling users to earn up to 15% APY with a single click.

We make this possible with a single, powerful API, battle hardened blockchain protocol, and intuitive web application that enable them to customise, configure, and automate USDT yield products from end-to-end, across front, middle, and back office systems. Our institutional grade, bankruptcy remote legal structure and network of Tier 1 financial institutions enables us to provide them access to a wide range of yield options at a very high standard of quality, professionalism, and security.

As USDT becomes the new savings account for billions, OpenTrade is powering the underlying fixed-income layer of the stablecoin economy. From rural farmers to urban freelancers, anyone with an internet connection can now hold dollars, earn stable yield from a wide variety of sources, and maintain and build wealth. This is an enormous leap forward.