Booking.com Partner Travala Adds USDT

The cryptocurrency-friendly hotel and accommodation booking service partner of Booking.com Travala now accepts payments from a controversial cryptocurrency leader, the USDT stablecoin.

On January 10 Travala published an announcement, stating that it added Tether (USDT) as a payment option in 230 countries where it operates.

Matt Luczynski, CEO of Travala.com said: “Part of our mission is to provide our users with a wide choice of the most well known and used cryptocurrencies so it made perfect sense for us to integrate USDT as a payment option on Travala.com.”

Besides Tether, Travala also accepts Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Litecoin, Binance Coin, Bitcoin Cash, Stellar and Cardano alongside its own cryptocurrency, AVA.

Tether’s positions on the crypto market

Tether appeared on the market in 2017, promising to evade fluctuations with one-to-one fiat currency conversion ratio. Merchants showed great enthusiasm to the Hong Kong-based stablecoin.

Sean Mackay, operations lead at CoinPayments.net said that ”Merchants used to accept Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and convert it into Tether in order to hedge against the volatility. Now we are seeing the payments just being done directly in Tether.”

Tether faces legal troubles

Last April, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced that her office obtained a court order against Tether Limited and its parent company iFinex for a cover-up to hide the loss of $850 million from cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, which undercuts USDT’s claims of stability derived from the U.S dollar.

In spite of iFinex’s legal woes, and the sixth-highest market capitalization, Tether continues to enjoy the highest trading volumes per day and per month. As of writing, the 24h trading volume of the stablecoin exceeded $51 billion, compared to Bitcoin’s over $40 billion, according to Coinmarketcap.