Why Argentinian Crypto Folks Can’t Get Enough of Him

It has been almost exactly a year since Javier Milei became the 59th President of Argentina.

Inaugurated on December 10, 2023, the flamboyant libertarian economist — a former goalkeeper who cloned his dogs and called central banks “the worst garbage that exists on this Earth” — had vowed to end the South American nation’s hyperinflation crisis and to drastically reduce government spending.

Since then, Argentina’s monthly inflation rate has fallen from 25.5% in December 2023 to 2.7% last October. The government has registered a fiscal surplus for nine months in a row, a substantial achievement considering it’s been running deficits since 2008. The Argentinian peso isn’t in freefall against the U.S. dollar anymore. And while the country’s economy is projected to have shrunk by 4% in 2024, a 6% rebound is expected in 2025.

For at least some, the biggest surprise so far is that Milei actually followed through on most of his campaign promises, according to Alfonso Campenni, Latin American growth lead at Matter Labs, the main developer behind the Ethereum layer-2 protocol ZKsync.

“For Argentinians, it’s super hard to understand the concept of a politician doing his job,” Campenni, a native of Buenos Aires, told CoinDesk in an interview. “At this time of the year, people are usually mad because they can’t buy things for Christmas [because of hyperinflation]. But now it’s like: ‘Okay, maybe this is something new.’ It’s peaceful, it’s super weird.”

“I was at a tech event where Milei was invited. He got a standing ovation when he arrived on stage,” Jack Saracco, another Buenos Aires native and the co-founder of crypto payment platform Ping, told CoinDesk. “Most Argentinian crypto people love what he’s doing. There’s a meme going around: ‘When are we going to be able to vote for him again? Because I would vote for him over and over again. He’s doing exactly what I voted for.’”

The reforms have had costs, though. Argentina’s poverty rate spiked to almost 53% in the first six months of 2024, from roughly 42% in the second part of 2023, as Milei’s administration slashed funding for a number of welfare programs and laid off tens of thousands of public employees.

“During the campaign, he said, ‘I won’t lie to the Argentinians, we have very tough years ahead of us,’” Campenni said. “He was super honest on what will happen [in the years to come].”

Milei’s ideological kinship with crypto

The crypto sector’s enthusiasm for Milei is notable considering that, unlike President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, the 54-year-old economist hasn’t shown particular interest in developing a national regulatory framework for digital assets.

“His primary focus has been addressing the country’s economic crisis,” Juan Aranovich, an Argentine research analyst at crypto venture fund Ryze Labs, told CoinDesk. “These initiatives have dominated his agenda and left little room for crypto specific policies.”

Even so, the crypto scene, locally and internationally, has resonated with Milei’s brand of libertarianism.

Bitcoin was designed to permit individuals to transact digitally without third-party intermediaries, and Satoshi Nakamoto’s message in the Genesis Block is an explicit criticism of Western monetary policy in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

Milei, for his part, vowed during his presidential campaign to shut down the Argentinian central bank, telling Bloomberg: “Central banks are divided in four categories: the bad ones, like the Federal Reserve, the very bad ones, like the ones in Latin America, the horribly bad ones, and the Central Bank of Argentina.”

The Argentine president has yet to follow through on that particular pledge. In the meantime, he has encouraged a dollarization of the nation’s economy, meaning to increase the circulation of U.S. dollars and reduce the population’s reliance on pesos.

“Dollarization is a fiat-based approach which contrasts with Bitcoin’s vision of decentralized money,” Aranovich said. “[American crypto entrepreneur] Balaji Srinivasan called Milei a Bitcoin President, but this is a misinterpretation of his stance.”

Saracco agreed. “I don’t think dollarization is the best way to go, because we will basically be adopting the U.S. dollar inflation,” he said. “The U.S. is doing a pretty poor job at auditing government spending, and at not funding so many wars. … If we dollarize our economy, we will be at the mercy of Washington.”

That’s why, at the end of the day, crypto in Argentina remains a grassroots affair. Chainalysis ranked the country number 15 out of 151 countries in terms of crypto adoption in its 2024 report. The country’s stablecoin trading volume, already on a steady rise, exploded three months into Milei’s term. Yes, the government has been relatively supportive of crypto technology, but decades of economic mismanagement have created high levels of distrust in public institutions. That distrust will compel Argentinians to keep using crypto even if the economic crisis ends, Saracco argued.

Coming back to Argentina

For years, rampant inflation compelled Argentinians to try and save money in U.S. dollars, to the point where the state imposed currency controls, placing a $200-per-month limit on the amount of dollars Argentinians can legally purchase. This, in turn, birthed a cash-based black market where greenbacks — called blue dollars, for the blue stripe found on $100 bills — can be exchanged for a much higher rate than the official one.

One year into Milei’s presidency, these capital controls are still in place, though the government has rolled out a tax amnesty program to encourage Argentinians to deposit foreign currencies into bank accounts, thereby drawing the money back into the formal economy. Roughly $277 billion U.S. dollars are thought to be stashed away outside the financial system, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Census.

But the discrepancy between the official dollar/peso rate and the blue dollar/peso rate has shrunk to almost nothing. In the days before Milei’s election, you could get 350 pesos for one dollar at the official rate, but close to 1,000 pesos per dollar on the black market. The official rate is now at 1,032 pesos, while blue dollars cost 1,090 pesos. For Argentinians, it’s a sign that the economy is healing

“Normally everybody is talking about politics all the time, all day long, everything is politics here, politics and football,” Campenni said. “Now nobody is talking all day about politics. … It’s like you’re at a sunset and everything is okay.”

The fact that Milei is famous internationally is a point of pride, too. The Argentine president was the first foreign leader to visit U.S. President-elect Donald Trump after his electoral victory in November; his meetings with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have also boosted his image abroad and at home, according to Campenni. “I’ve been to Istanbul and Denver and everybody was calling Milei a superhero,” he said.

For Aranovich, the big test will be the midterm elections, scheduled for October 2025. These, he said, will provide insight into the public’s perception of the government’s shock therapy policy. Milei’s political party, La Libertad Avanza, currently has 40 seats out of 257 in the nation’s Chamber of Deputies, and seven seats out of 72 in the Senate. The party has held a solid lead in most opinion polls for the legislative elections, but a lot can happen in the span of 11 months.

Campenni is optimistic. “A lot of people left our country during the COVID pandemic, and now they’re coming back to Argentina, because there are a lot of possibilities,” he said.