Venezuela Parallel Dollar Archive Opens 16 Years of Rate Data

Key Facts

—The country — Venezuela has about 28 million people and the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Years of inflation and currency controls have made the US dollar the real yardstick for prices.

—The gap — Venezuelans watch the brecha, the distance between the central bank’s official dollar rate and the rate people pay on the street. The parallel market has no exchange, no clearing house and no duty to report.

—What changed — The gap has narrowed sharply. The median premium in 2025 was 35.15% and the peak 85.82%; on 18 September 2026 it closed at 11.44%.

—What happened — On 21 September 2026 Daemon Jacques-Palmer, a Canadian archivist of Venezuelan exchange-rate data, based between Dublin and Montreal, put his entire exchange-rate collection online under a Creative Commons licence.

—The numbers — Six files: the official rate daily from May 2019, covering 1,771 trading days, and the parallel rate from June 2010, covering 4,088 days. The spread comes daily, hourly and in 30-minute bars.

—What it means for you — You can now check official claims yourself. On 24 August the acting president put the gap at 12.3%, but it closed that day at 15.90% and its low was 13.17%.

—Still open — A narrower percentage is not a smaller gap in cash: about 167 bolívares per US$1 in September 2025 against about 849 now, so the same premium is a far larger sum. Whether the premium stays near 11% is unknown.

Exchange-rate series: Daemon Jacques-Palmer (xjp.cl), CC BY 4.0. Official rates cross-checked against the Banco Central de Venezuela’sdaily publication.

More: Venezuela news in English, every day from The Rio Times.

Why Venezuela Has Two Prices for One Dollar

A parallel market appears wherever the state fixes a price below what buyers will pay. Venezuela imposed exchange controls on 5 February 2003 and kept some version of them for fifteen years. Under CADIVI you needed permission to buy dollars at the cheap rate. Permission was scarce, and the gap between the two prices was worth real money.

Later systems tried to auction the gap away. SICAD arrived in July 2013 and SICAD II in March 2014. SIMADI followed in February 2015, then the DIPRO and DICOM tiers from 2016. Each one opened close to the street price and then fell behind it. Criminal penalties for trading currency outside the system were finally dropped on 2 August 2018.

Eleven Zeros, Removed Twice

On 20 August 2018 the government replaced the bolívar fuerte with the bolívar soberano and struck five zeros. One new unit was worth 100,000 old ones. On 1 October 2021 it did the same again, cutting six more zeros for the bolívar digital at a million to one.

Add the three zeros dropped in 2008 and one bolívar today stands in for 100 trillion of the pre-2008 kind. Redenomination changes the label, not the value. A long price series is only useful if somebody tracks the cuts and restates older figures on one scale.

Why the Two Series Start When They Do

Neither start date is arbitrary. On 10 May 2019 the central bank let commercial banks run exchange desks, known as mesas de cambio. Only then did a daily official reference rate begin to mean much. That is where the official file picks up. It also explains the May 2019 start point.

The parallel file starts eight and a half years earlier. DolarToday, the best known parallel tracker, went live on 18 May 2010. It priced the bolívar from money changing in Cúcuta, the Colombian city on the border. Caracas blocked the site in 2013 and sued its operators in a US court in 2015. The case was dismissed in 2016, and the site still runs from abroad.

Who Sets the Street Rate Today

Border cash has largely given way to screens. Trackers such as Monitor Dólar now build a parallel rate from peer-to-peer crypto trades, mostly on Binance, plus feeds such as Yadio. Quotes that stray too far from the consensus are discarded.

On 19 September 2026 the central bank’s official rate stood at 848.54 bolívares to the US dollar. P2P quotes that week clustered near 950. None of these trackers is audited, and each uses its own basket of sources. That is why two published premium figures for the same day rarely match to the decimal point.

What the Central Bank Will and Will Not Tell You

The Banco Central de Venezuela publishes a daily official rate, and it has kept doing so. Almost everything else went dark. Regular statistical bulletins stopped in 2016, on the eve of hyperinflation and default. Little came out for a decade.

That changed in early 2026, when the bank started publishing again. It put 2025 inflation at 475.28 percent and year-on-year inflation at 649.5 percent by the close of the first quarter. Detail remains thin. Officials described first-quarter growth without attaching a number. There is no official parallel rate, because the state does not recognise one.

Why This Matters If You Are Paid in Dollars

Delcy Rodríguez has run the country as acting president, presidenta encargada in Spanish. She was sworn in on 5 January 2026, two days after Nicolás Maduro was taken into US custody. Her government pays public-sector bonuses that are set in dollars but handed over in bolívares at the official rate of the day.

The base minimum wage has not moved since March 2022. It sits at 130 bolívares, about 15 US cents at the official rate in late September 2026. Most pay now arrives as bonuses instead. If shops price at the street rate and you are paid at the official one, the gap is a pay cut nobody announced. A dated, public series is how you measure it.

This article was produced by The Rio Times’ automated newsroom system. How we use AI · Report an error · Editorial responsibility: Matthias Camenzind, Editor-in-Chief