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Tether acquired a nearly 10% stake for $100 million in NYSE-listed agricultural conglomerate Adecoagro SA, a regulatory filing shows.
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Agrotoken, together with Adecoagro, started the development of three stablecoins, SOYA, CORA and WHEA, which allow producers to have their own currency represented in grains, Agrotoken CEO Novillo Astrada said.
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Tether is also working on a tokenization platform expected to launch later this year, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said earlier.
Tether, issuer of the $118 billion market cap stablecoin USDT, and its latest investment in a Latin American farming giant may not have much in common at first glance, but both companies share ambition in tokenization of real-world assets.
The stablecoin giant invested $100 million to acquire a 9.8% stake in Adecoagro SA (AGRO), a Luxembourg-based agricultural conglomerate that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, according to an August filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Adecoagro owns 213,500 hectares of farmland and industrial facilities spread across Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, with businesses in the crops, rice, dairy and sugarcane segments, according to its website. It produces 2.8 million tons of agricultural products and over 1 million MWh of renewable energy.
Adecoagro also has a minority stake in Agrotoken, an Argentina-based company that focuses on agricultural commodities tokenization. The company invested in the startup in 2021, which "seeks to transform grains into a digital asset, to store or exchange for supplies, services, and other assets," according to Adecoagro's annual integrated report.
Agrotoken CEO and co-founder Eduardo Novillo Astrada said in a video posted on LinkedIn that Adecoagro was a founder of Agrotoken and owns a 10% stake in the startup.
"Mariano Bosch, the CEO of Adecoagro, has always supported us," Novillo Astrada wrote. "He had great vision and understood that what he wanted to do was tokenized land, something we are also working on together with Adecoagro and other major agricultural partners."
Agrotoken claims to have transacted $70 million in tokenization deals with more than 250 merchants and over 40 grain holders, in addition to having interacted with more than 1,000 farmers and tokenizing 230,000 tonnes.
Together with Bosch, Agrotoken started the development of three stablecoins, SOYA, CORA and WHEA, according to Novillo Astrada, which allow producers to have their own currency represented in grains. "This is a clear message of the connection between blockchain technology and agribusiness." he said.