Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is February 15, 2025. I'm almost out of this humble abode and back into my proper home, where my podcast studio is, my new office is, and all the other things. I'm just waiting on the construction to finalize, but I will be back in, and it will be beautiful and incredible. This is kind of one of my loner homes that I normally use for the employees, but I've been here for a while.
I want to make a quick video to talk about something my paths crossed with. There's a very interesting picture I figured I’d share with you because it’s all over Twitter. Here is me at Tech Forum Argentina, and here is the president of Argentina, Javier Milei. They didn’t have enough room for me on the side, so I ran up and kneeled, and there we go. Right here is the person who put on the Tech Forum, and his partners were there. Now, there’s Emin from Avalanche, and this is Dom from ICP. These two men do not like each other. And there’s Jan, who is apparently with Milei. I guess these guys got together and launched a token, or at least it’s alleged that they launched a $4 billion token called Libra. Insider wallets had all the distribution and sold at the top.
For those who have been following this Libra thing, basically what happened is that the president of Argentina tweeted about it. 82% of the supply was controlled by insiders, and after it started pumping, the insiders dumped, the token collapsed, and now everybody’s trying to run away like a chicken with their head cut off. It was a very frustrating experience in Argentina. When I flew down there, we went there multiple times and engaged with a variety of different people, filed all the presidential protocols, and kept trying to get a one-on-one meeting with Milei because we had heard that the government was basically open for business, meaning there was a great opportunity for getting blockchain infrastructure into Argentina.
Emin, the other guy in the picture, is a very good businessman. He’s very sharp and smart, so he held a large Avalanche conference down there. I went and visited him, and we had all the pleasantries. He was thinking the same thing I was thinking: Argentina is open for business. So they filed all the paperwork as well. The organizers of that Tech Forum said the president was going to come and speak, and we could sit down and have a great conversation with him. I thought, “Oh, this is going to be exciting.”
It went from, “Hey, we’re going to have a conversation,” to, “Well, it’s going to be a roundtable of industry insiders like yourself with the president.” Then, when we showed up and waited all day for it, it turned into, “Oh, well, actually, it’s going to be a handshake and a photograph.” That felt like a bit of a bait and switch. But we said, “You know, we’re talking to all his other people.” We talked to various ministers, and really, Theo Schwarzenegger was the big guy we wanted to talk to because he was the Ministry of Deregulation. We wanted to understand what, if any, opportunity there was for public-private partnerships because I view Argentina as a labor market.
We’re building Lace Wallet down there, creating jobs. We signed an agreement with Globant, a 20,000-developer company. We don’t actually need a single deal with the Argentine government; we were just curious what Milei wanted to do. We encountered a lot of people along the way, and they said, “Hey, you know, if you give us a little something, we can get you a meeting.” I said, “Well, that would be a violation of the FCPA; we can’t do that.” Suddenly, they stopped talking to us.
We were always curious about what was going on there, and then lo and behold, this whole thing happens. A lot of people come to me and say, “What’s your take on all of it?” Since you’re in the pictures, here’s what I think happened. I think there are some people in that inner circle surrounding Milei who took advantage of his lack of knowledge of our industry. What happened was they convinced him that it would be a good idea to launch some crypto infrastructure and endorse it. They used the president of Argentina to make a lot of money and left him to clean up the mess after they ran away.
It’s hard to say if it’s people in his inner circle or people adjacent to it. Welcome to Latin American politics; they get pretty dirty. You have to have ironclad principles when you walk into these things. In every country I’ve tried to do business in Latin America and South America, I’ve had at least one person in the private sector or government say, “To come here and do business, you have to bribe someone.” We immediately shut them down and said, “No way, no how,” because that’s just not who we are. Sometimes it costs political relationships, and you don’t get any penetration, but more often than not, it leads to more good than bad.
What you’re witnessing right now is the end result of what happens when people take the easy path instead of the hard path. The frustrating thing for me is that all Milei had to do was let the blockchain industry work with him, and the entire country could be revolutionized and transformed. Blockchain-based voting systems, blockchain-based budget systems, blockchain-based supply chains, blockchain identity—there are all kinds of really cool, amazing things. Now, the Peronistas are going to come in, take advantage of this entire situation, and basically undo any chance of the public sector meaningfully adopting cryptocurrencies because everything will get associated with Libra in Argentina.
We already presumed there was no path forward to work with the Milei government because of the deregulation nature; there was no stability or certainty. While I was there, the government got rid of the AFIP, which is their tax service. It would be like Trump getting rid of the IRS. So what good is an Argentine government contract or relationship when the very ministry you’re signing documents with could be out of business in six months?
To give you an example, we were working very closely with their Minister of Foreign Affairs on getting visas for the African delegates for the Constitutional Convention. We were talking to the minister herself, and she took us very seriously. In fact, when they had the issue with the embassy in Venezuela and there was an attack on the Argentine Embassy there, she still took the meeting with us. This is how seriously they took us, and she was working diligently to get visas for people. Then she got fired. Unfortunately, that meant the African delegates couldn’t get visas, and we had to do the split convention with Kenya. It gives you a sense of how shaky things were there.
That said, overwhelming crypto adoption is happening. There’s a $100 billion worth of cryptocurrencies and a $700 billion GDP, meaning out of every $7 of value, $1 is in crypto, which is extraordinary when you really think about it. Our view is that Argentina is a great private sector for real finance; it’s a great private sector for regional deals, as the foundation did in one of the regions. We talked to the mayor of Buenos Aires about his identity pilot, and there are a lot of really cool things going on there. But the government’s not really in a position to offer meaningful relationships or contracts because of the instability.
We said, “All right, we’ll sit on it, wait on it.” But it makes me a little sad to see this entire scandal come out because, at the end of the day, Milei is the first elected libertarian in the entire world. I worked for Ron Paul back in 2007-2008, and to see a libertarian become president of a country is something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. I repeatedly told the people around Milei, from his sister Karina to others, “Tell the president that everybody wants something from him, and I’m the only person in the entire country right now who doesn’t want anything at all. I don’t want any money, I don’t want any pictures, any prestige; I just want him to do well and succeed.”
I really hope that the agenda of reducing the size of the government in Argentina works out for the best for everybody. I did a lot of interviews while I was there; they were all in Spanish, and those interviews reflected that character as well. I am pretty sad that this is the outcome. Just one event is going to create a lot of political damage for him, his brand, his reputation, and for the libertarian brand in Argentina. It may even undo his presidency, depending upon how far the scandal goes and how much he actually knew.
From what I know of the man and how he does business, I think he’s an academic at heart. I believe he has the best intentions and truly does believe the things he says. I also believe he is surrounded by Latin American politics, which are often serpentine, Byzantine, and extraordinarily treacherous. Everybody pretends to be your friend while having a dagger in their hand ready for your back. Every single person is trying to use what you are and what you have to their advantage to enhance their state in life. You seldom get a true friendship; people only support you when you have power, and when you start faltering, they find a way to dogpile.
I guess this video is one of the few that’ll be made in his defense. I think Milei is a good person, and I think he surrounded himself with some bad people because he didn’t have the proper political infrastructure to actually be the president. He stumbled into the job, and he’s learning how to do it. Unfortunately, when you don’t have all the best people, they don’t have your best interest at heart, and you end up getting wrapped up in things you can’t control or fully understand. By the time you realize what’s happened, the damage is already done. That’s the consequence of being a head of state and doing things at this scale on the national stage.
I hope it all works out; I really do. I’m sad that at the time we couldn’t do more for them. I wouldn’t have launched a meme coin; we would have focused on something else, probably government spending. But maybe it’s all for the best. We’ll continue investing in Argentina and continue building. We’re hiring people specifically for the Lace Wallet mobile client, and they’re doing a great job down there. We got a nice office for rent right next to Globant Tower. We’re working closely with Globant on Midnight, and they’re doing some great work there. They’re really excited about Cardano, and it’ll be fun to work with Maratón Libre and other brands down there.
A lot of my good friends are in Argentina. The whole Bitcoin DeFi play is actually being done there with BitMEX, and they’ve been working on Bitcoin for over 12 years. The dog barks, but the caravan moves on. It’s a sad day for Argentinian crypto, but at the end of the day, we’ll survive and keep moving forward. I hope this gives you a window into how we do politics: slow and steady, and we stick with the principles and morals. Sometimes it works out for us, and some days it’s frustrating. Believe me, it’s really frustrating to show up at a conference and think you’re going to have a one-on-one with the president, and then it turns from a roundtable to a handshake and a photo.
But you make the best out of it. We always figured we’d run into them at CPAC or somewhere else. As I said, we talked to plenty of people in his government and continue to engage with them. We didn’t really think of it as a bad thing, just a surprising one. This one was a bit surprising, though; I would have figured they would have had better judgment about who they chose to actually give that meeting to and talk to. When you have poor judgment, these are the types of things that happen, and you have to just deal with them and move on.
If we can be of any use to anyone there, and we have a presence there, we’re more than happy to help clean up the mess. In any event, we do hope that libertarianism continues to grow and thrive. We believe in the philosophy of deregulation, and we think that one can continue the march even if one stumbles from time to time. I wish Milei well, and I hope for the best. I hope he continues being the leader of Argentina because he has a lot of very important work to do. All leaders grow when they run into these problems, and I hope he survives them. Good night, everyone.
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