Economic Monitor · Venezuela

Methodology

Official rates (USD BCV, EUR BCV)

The official rates come from the Banco Central de Venezuela's own quarterly workbooks (tipo de cambio de referencia, sistema de mercado cambiario), not from a third party. Each row is dated by its fecha valor — the day the rate is in force — and the figure is the selling (ASK) column, rounded half-up to two decimals.

BCV publishes each fecha valor a banking day ahead. Weekends and holidays carry the rate of the next published fecha valor, which is how the bank itself applies it; and a rate already published for a coming day is shown on the card as "from Tue 15", never as today's.

The euro before September 2025 is not a BCV figure. BCV's euro reference is, to a few hundredths of a per cent, the dollar reference times the international EUR/USD rate of the previous day: on the 346 days this page has both, EUR ÷ USD sits within 10 basis points (median) of the European Central Bank's reference fix, 95 % of days within 36, and BCV's own euro of April–September 2025 is reproduced within 15 basis points (median, worst day 1.3 %). So from 2019-05-13 to 2025-08-25 the euro on this page is derived: the weekly-average dollar times the mean ECB fix of the same week, carried under the source "ECB cross" and never mixed with a published row. From 2025-09-01 the euro is BCV's own, read from the same workbook as the dollar. A derived row is replaced only by hand, and only by a BCV figure, if the bank's 2020–2025 workbooks are recovered; the study is documented alongside this site.

USDT (Binance P2P, as computed by UnoPago)

The USDT figure is UnoPago's own reference rate, read from its public API. UnoPago samples the Binance P2P market every fifteen minutes: one request for the first page of buy offers for USDT in bolívars — the price a holder of USDT receives when selling — and the plain average of the prices returned. At midnight in Caracas the 96 samples of the day are averaged into one figure, and that daily average is the number on this page.

It is a rate built from posted offers, not from executed trades: Binance publishes no record of transactions, so every Venezuelan USDT reference is of this kind. Three properties of the method are worth knowing when reading it. The first page usually includes one promoted advertisement whose price sits outside the market's order, and it enters the average with the same weight as the others. The best offers on that page are typically for large tickets, well above what an individual transaction moves, so a small order is filled at a somewhat lower price. And a whole-day average published at midnight lags the market on days when the rate moves.

Between 2026-06-10 and 2026-07-30 the sampler was not running and the daily figure was entered by hand; those days appear on this page under the source "collected" rather than "Binance P2P". UnoPago is reviewing this method; the study behind that review is documented alongside this site.

During the day the card shows a running value: this monitor samples the same Binance book every fifteen minutes and applies UnoPago's method to it, so the figure marked "today · running" is a provisional replica of what will be published at midnight. The settled figure is shown beneath it and is the one the history and the charts carry.

The gap

The gap is the distance between the USDT rate and an official rate, as a percentage of the official rate. It is never the two newest numbers on the page divided: USDT is an average of a whole day, published the morning after, while BCV publishes a day ahead, so the two newest figures can sit two days apart. Each USDT quote is paired with the official rate in force on its own date — at most eight days older — and the rate used is printed on the card. The 30-day change is in percentage points of the gap itself.

The market rate

Venezuela has had two prices for the dollar since exchange controls began, in February 2003. The official rate is the one the central bank sets or manages; the market rate — what is commonly called the parallel dollar — is the price at which bolívars and dollars actually change hands outside that window. The distance between the two is the price of access: official dollars are allocated — today through the BCV's sales to the banks, before that by CADIVI and its successors — and whoever does not obtain them buys at the other price. Publishing that second rate was an exchange offence from 2010 to August 2018, which is why for years it was measured by sites operating from abroad; since that law was repealed it is published openly. In 2026 the BCV's sales moved from cash to digital dollars and back to a mix of both, and access to the digital ones is hard for many smaller firms and individuals — which, the IIES-UCAB notes in its September 2026 report, presses on the gap.

What is traded has changed over the years, and with it what the rate measures: bond swaps (permuta) until 2010; cash on the Colombian border — DolarToday's Cúcuta dollar — from 2010 to 2018; transfers and remittances averaged by monitors such as Monitor Dólar from 2019; and since 2021, above all, USDT — digital dollars — bought and sold for bolívars on peer-to-peer platforms, Binance first among them. Each venue has its own price and its own costs; they usually sit within about one per cent of each other, cash a little further.

This monitor takes UnoPago's USDT on Binance P2P as its market reference for two reasons, neither of which is "because it is the truth": it is the rate UnoPago's merchants settle at, and its method is published and auditable end to end — the USDT section describes it and the study reviewing it is documented alongside this site — which no other monitor offers. It measures the price of a digital dollar, not a banknote; it comes from posted offers, not closed trades; and it is a market that runs around the clock, weekends included, while BCV publishes Monday to Friday. Against the other monitors it sits within about one per cent: in the study, the criptoya and DolarApi references differ from UnoPago's figure by between −1.0 % and +0.8 %, and at the end of August 2026 Monitor Dólar closed 1.2 % above it.

The gap reads as a price, not a forecast. When positive it says how much more the dollar costs whoever has no access to the official one, and it passes into prices, because shops restock at the market's cost. It closes from two sides: when the official rate depreciates faster than the market — as it did from 145 % on 2026-01-07 to 11.5 % on 2026-08-05: the BCV dollar rose 142 %, from 311.88 to 755.16, and USDT 10 %, from 763.55 to 841.84 — or when the market falls back, as in 2019–2021, when for five months it sat below the official rate. A wide gap does not announce a devaluation on a date; it says the official price is not clearing the market.

The history before 2019

UnoPago's own data begins in May 2019 for the dollar (and, derived from it, the euro) and in October 2025 for USDT. Everything the charts show before that is a month-end history imported from a research dataset assembled outside UnoPago (the 2013 Harvard Kennedy School study The Kangaroo Peg, revisited in 2026), not collected by this monitor. Its sources are the central bank's own workbook from 2016 on, the decree rates as tabulated in the Spanish Wikipedia's annex on the bolívar (CC BY-SA) before that, DolarToday's archived workbook for the market rate from June 2010 to September 2021, the permuta table of dolarlechugaverde before it, and Monitor Dólar as transcribed by that Wikipedia annex from October 2021 to September 2025 (December 2021 to May 2022 is its monthly average). All values are restated in today's bolívar: figures before 2008 divided by 10¹⁴, 2008 to August 2018 by 10¹¹, then by 10⁶ until September 2021. Hover shows each figure in the bolívar of its day.

Say it plainly: from 2010 to 2018 there was no single official rate. The solid USD line follows the principal, most appreciated one — CADIVI, then CENCOEX at 6.30 and DIPRO at 10 — the rate for priority imports that most buyers never obtained. Measured against it, the gap passes one million per cent in December 2017; that is arithmetic, not a price anyone paid. The dashed line, March 2013 to January 2018, is the most depreciated window a firm could legally use — SICAD I, SICAD II, SIMADI, DICOM — and against it the same month's gap is near 3,200 %. SITME (2010–2013) is not in the data. 2012 is left out of the window because the source labels the permuta rate SICAD that year.

The market line changes hands three times — permuta, DolarToday, Monitor Dólar, then USDT on Binance P2P — and its level differs by a few per cent at each seam; the 2019–2025 values are second-hand. In five months of 2019–2021 the market rate sat below the official one, and the chart shows it. Before 2019 the series are month ends, so nothing between two month ends is known to this page.

Refresh

The dataset is rebuilt every night at 00:15 in Caracas, after UnoPago has published the previous day's USDT average. New rows are only ever added; a figure already published here is never rewritten. If UnoPago's API cannot be reached, or has moved past a day nobody fetched, that day's USDT figure is rebuilt from this monitor's own fifteen-minute record of the same Binance book with UnoPago's method, and marked provisional; a published average replaces it if one ever exists.

What these numbers are not

Every rate is bolívars for one unit of the currency shown, exactly as published; nothing is interpolated and no missing day is filled in. The official rate is the central bank's reference, not a price at which anyone is obliged to trade; the USDT rate is an average of offers. Neither is a quote to you, and nothing on this page is financial advice.

The chart opens on the last twelve months. The full range, back to 2005, spans fourteen orders of magnitude, so it is drawn on a log scale, where a linear axis would flatten everything before the last redenomination onto the floor.

These are central-bank and market figures, not Trading Economics data. The indicators page draws its exchange rate from a different source and need not agree to the bolívar.

Data coverage

• USD — observations: 747, from 2019-05-13 to 2026-10-23; sources: BCV_weekly_avg, BCV; longest gap: 7 days.
• The USD series changes source on 2025-09-01: BCV_weekly_avg before, BCV after. A comparison across that date spans two measures.
• EUR — observations: 747, from 2019-05-13 to 2026-10-23; sources: ECB cross, BCV, collected, BCV; longest gap: 7 days.
• The EUR series changes source on 2025-09-01: ECB cross before, BCV after. A comparison across that date spans two measures.
• The EUR series changes source on 2025-10-02: BCV before, collected after. A comparison across that date spans two measures.
• The EUR series changes source on 2026-02-02: collected before, BCV after. A comparison across that date spans two measures.
• USDT — observations: 367, from 2025-10-21 to 2026-10-22; sources: collected, Binance P2P, collected, Binance P2P; no gaps, the series is daily throughout.
• The USDT series changes source on 2026-02-02: collected before, Binance P2P after. A comparison across that date spans two measures.
• The USDT series changes source on 2026-06-10: Binance P2P before, collected after. A comparison across that date spans two measures.
• The USDT series changes source on 2026-07-31: collected before, Binance P2P after. A comparison across that date spans two measures.
• The gap compares each USDT quote with the most recent official rate at or before it, and is left out entirely when that official rate is more than 8 days old.
• Before 2019-05-13 the USD line is the month-end history described under Methodology, from 2005-01-31: CADIVI 2005-01 to 2013-01, CENCOEX 2013-02 to 2016-01, DIPRO 2016-02 to 2017-12, DICOM 2018-01 to 2018-07, BCV 2018-08 to 2019-04.
• Before 2025-10-21 the USDT line is the month-end history described under Methodology, from 2005-01-31: permuta 2005-01 to 2010-05, DolarToday 2010-06 to 2021-09, Monitor Dólar 2021-10 to 2025-09.