On Valentine’s Day. Friday 14th February 2025, a financial crisis broke in Argentina when president Javier Milei promoted the launch of a new crypto-currency in the form of a token (a memecoin) called the $LIBRA launched on the Solana bitcoin platform, the meme honoured Javier Milei’s political party La Libertad Avanza (hence the name Libra).
Milei posted a short-lived tweet on his personal X/Twitter account @JMilei, but then the president hurriedly deleted the tweet as the price of the $LIBRA collapsed. It was going to be a long Weekend.
Javier Milei posted his tweet a matter of minutes after the $LIBRA was launched by Hayden Davis, the US memecoin launch facilitator who was paid to bring the $LIBRA to life. Davis described the launch of the $LIBRA as a test. He said in an excellent interview on the voidzilla youtube channel on Monday 17th February how he had been consulting with the President and their team on how to tokenise many parts of the Argentine government, presumably for blockchain transparency to reduce corruption. Davis visited with the President many times in Argentina and worked with two associates, also known to Javier Milei, Mauricio and Manuel, the organisers of Tech Forum in 2024.
Mauricio Novelli is the ’N’ (with his partner Jeremías Walsh) in “N&W” Professional Traders SRL. Novelli is the local man who seems to have put the deal together. Novelli has known Milei for years, indeed ‘his company ‘N&W’ contracted Javier Milei to work for them. Milei helped promote their brand and the courses they offered. Manuel the other Argentine connection mentioned by Davis as a regular contact for $LIBRA is Manuel Terrones Godoy. Based in Mexico, Godoy and Mauricio Novelli were co-founders of the Tech Forum in Buenos Aires in 2024 where all of the actors in this tragic alleged scam were present together.
President Milei spoke at the conference and had a meeting with the CEO of KIP Protocol’s Julian Peh there also. Mr Peh’s technology company is based in Panama. KIP Networks set up the project behind the $LIBRA and launched the Website “vivalalibertadproject.com” .
The direct promotion of investments by an acting Argentine President is illegal under an Argentine public ethics law but it is quite possible that such technicalities would have been overlooked were it not for the huge financial disaster that occurred when a tremendous selloff (only hours after the $LIBRA launched) brought the nominal value of the billion tokens down from a peak of about $4.5Bn. in two hours to just hundreds of millions losing 95% of the active token’s value. Unfortunately sharp sell offs (bitcoin traders call them snipes) are not at all unusual in the Wild West that is crypto memecoins which is why they are sometimes referred to as shitcoins. The risk of disaster is especially high when tokens are issued with maximum liquidity (i.e. no restrictions on token sales). Sources said that 80% of the $LIBRA coins were liquid and so could be sold even minutes after a launch. That said the $LIBRA sell-off is the worst such disaster so far in the short history of memecoins and the second to involve an acting president in a week. Javier Milei has an analogy in the Central African Republic in President Touadéra who acted in videos to launch his $CAR memecoin.
On February 11th, just three days before Milei, President Faustin-Archange Touadéra of the Central African Republic launched the $CAR memecoin. Touadéra says he did this “to raise the profile of the country”. The $CAR memecoin also suffered a 90% collapse in early trading. It is not known if the same teams were involved in the $CAR and the $LIBRA but Hayden Davis did admit to being involved in Donald Trump’s first lady, Melanie Trump’s, launch of her memecoin the $MELANIA which also collapsed in value in early trading.
Extremely sharp token sell-offs are referred to as “rug-pulls”. Both the $MELANIA and the $LIBRA tokens trade on the bitcoin platform “Solana” (technically an Etherium-light blockchain based in the United States) so if a rug-pull is proven it could carry a five year prison sentence in the US.
4.5Bn. US dollars worth of bitcoin value was created then 95% of it lost in this rug-pull in trades by professional, some of them insiders and also a few lucky retail investors. It has been reported that three insiders (founders of the $LIBRA) who Davis says are in Argentina walked away with somewhere between $87Mn. and $107Mn. from the $LIBRA.
Hayden Davis added that there is also about $100Mn. to $110Mn. dollars worth of bitcoin which he is holding in $LIBRA “treasury”. In that same interview he said he wished to have nothing to do with this money in his custody. It was not his and he was trying to return it to Argentina. He was clear he had asked his contacts in Argentina that terrible weekend seeking instructions as to what to do with the money and that, even by Monday 17th, nobody had replied. He proposed pumping this 110 million dollars back into the $LIBRA but was then still undecided.
“also to be clear, like, like it's my burden to bear, because nobody has said shit to me. Right like, I’m, I'm in this extreme, like, this is the the thing that I think people, I don’t (again it it's just insane, but I'm making decisions on behalf of the government of Argentina who's distanced himself from this. I have nothing to, like, if they want to refund it, that's what I would do if, like, you understand what I'm saying.
[…] Zero [guidance] Zero! Nobody said shit to me, zero, like zero.said Hayden Davis in the interview.
Litigation has been filed subsequently in the US and in Argentina including one by the Argentine law firm Moyano & Associates Studio with offices in Buenos Aires, Miami and in the UK. The Moyano suit requested that the US Department of Justice:
“seize [..] the funds identified belonging to HAYDEN MARK DAVIS, JULIAN PEH, FRANCISCO NOVELLI and MANUEL TERRONES GODOY on behalf of the victims of the $LIBRA the vivalalibertadproject.com scam”
-so at least one law firm seems to have an idea where the profits from the rug pull went. The same letter also requested the:
“USDOJ to investigate the role of the President of the Argentine Republic JAVIER MILEI in this scam, since he has promoted it, and has, in the past, promoted several business that turned into scams.”
The “Token with a purpose” page is taken direct from the Website “vivalalibertadproject.com” property of KIP Network Inc., a firm run by Julian Peh, based in Panama. The Domain Name was registered for just one year and the Website which describes the newly launched Website Project “Viva la libertad”. The simplistic idea seems to have been that any entrepreneur in Argentina can go to the site and fill in a Google form to ask for financial help from the $4.5Bn. which, unfortunately, has evaporated.
The website is not a serious. In fact it looks like a Website put together for a scam not a real financial project designed to finance the private sector of a national economy.
Fans of Javier Milei’s ideas invested a great part of the 100’s of millions of dollars in $LIBRA and this evaporated in fast sell trades particularly when major (though anonymous) founders of the $LIBRA shitcoin dumped the tokens in massive trades within hours of the launch. There were thousands of traders buying and selling $LIBRA for the first few hours then the big sales occurred and the value of was removed. Investigations have shown that just three bitcoin wallets extracted from $87Mn. to $107Mn. between them. All in all many hundreds of millions exchanged hands.
Political Fallout
It is difficult to see how Milei can extricate himself from this morass. Politically it is a nightmare and harms his guru-economist reputation among his fans, something never taken seriously by economists, but this scandal will be fought in the political sphere first then later in courts. Milei’s defense lawyers might argue that Javier Milei may have simply mentioned the project in his personal Twitter/X account in an innocent act of techno-exuberance, he does have his nerdy side. Indeed Milei himself said this in a Monday 17th interview which was later shown to have been censored with the consent of interviewer Jonatan Viale. The on-camera intervention by Milei’s consigliere Santiago Caputo which leaked after being cut from the “live” broadcast. The release of the censored part of this MIlei mea culpa video, which had been clipped from the broadcast TV version, was accidentally sent to YouTube live and is now public. Viale, the interviewer, was later quoted as saying that whomever released the cut just “shat on his career”.
Hayden Davis says that he is (was?) Javier Milei’s advisor. Indeed he said that he was consulting to Milei who intended to tokenise Argentine government transactions on the blockchain for transparency and that $LIBRA launch was “just an experiment”. Davis has posted selfies with the president and made a number of official visits meeting with Milei working with his Argentine partners Manuel Terrones Godoy and Mauricio Novelli. Davis said that he faces multiple death threats.
Another damning fact is that the $LIBRA is not the first fraudulent online service that Javier Milei has promoted. In 2022, Milei was paid to promote CoinX an online speculative investment which turned out to be a Ponzi scheme, and was later shut down. At the time Deputy Javier Milei was a congressman.
In a strange coincidence the Buenos Aires police arrested Francisco José Hauque in January 2025. Hauque was a financier of CoinX. He was arrested just weeks before this cryptogate scandal broke, seemingly entirely accidentally. Police intervened in what they said was an altercation in an automobile on Alvear Street in very well heeled area of dowtown Buenos Aires. Police said suspected Hauque of mistreating his female partner. They found two kilos of cocaine, a 9mm pistol, cash and Rolex watch in Mr. Hauque’s car. Both people in the car were detained by police.
It is not just Milei’s direct relationships with online scams or even his direct contact with the actors in the $LIBRA shitcoin, but also many members of Javier Milei’s immediate political entourage are also directly related to the N&W Professional Traders and some it seems have been deleting video evidence off YouTube. Milei himself once worked for N&W and it is also promoted by Agustin Laje and by Influencers close to Milei like DANAAN. The closeness of N&W Professional Traders with KIP Protocol has been denied as a subsidiary arrangement by the latter in a tweet with the help of their legal counsel.
All of the main players that are public at a tech conference in a nearby hotel Libertador in Buenos Aires owned by one of Javier Milei’s oligarch supporters Eduardo Elsztein in October 2024. Milei also had his election bunker for the successful 2023 presidential campaign in the same hotel and lived there until he moved into the Presidential residence. Many of these younger protagonists had taken photos and selfies with the president some even while they were in the Casa Rosada.
Possibly the most damning evidence against Javier Milei comes from the Tech Conference in October 2024 in Elzstein’s Libertador Hotel. Javier Milei himself spoke as did the head of Javier Milei’s Presidential cabinet political colleague Demian Reidel. This conference was organised by Mauricio Novelli. The project international associate, Singaporean national Julian Peh, also spoke at the event. He is the CEO of KIP Protocol, the company that was to run the project behind the $LIBRA token. All of this makes it difficult to credit the tweet from Javier Milei where he claims that he has no association with the people behind the $LIBRA.
On the technical side the launch of the new token all one billion of them was handled by a company called Kelsier Ventures who recently put out their own version of the $LIBRA story. Kelsier’s technical lead and CEO responsible for the $LIBRA is the aforementioned Hayden Davis. Davis said he had visited Argentina multiple times and said he was planning a number of much bigger “tokenisation” projects with Javier Milei and his associates in Argentina. He also stated that the $100Mn. to $110Mn. dollars worth of crypto coins from “fees, farming or liquidation” is under his control and he intended to inject it right back into the $LIBRA chart but this will probably be blocked by lawsuits demanding seizures.
The Office of the President of Argentina official Twitter/X account published the following at 10:30 AM Monday when the damage had already been done. $4.5 Bn. US Dollars had been wiped off the value of the $LIBRA in a matter of hours as well as nearly 6% being wiped off the MERVAL (the local stock exchange) and Argentine bonds took a hit too so president Javier Milei announced that he intends to investigate himself.
“In view of the facts, President Javier Milei has decided to immediately intervene with the Anti-Corruption Office (OA) to determine whether there was improper conduct on the part of any member of the National Government, including the President himself. […] the President of the Nation has decided to create an Investigation Task Force (ITF) within the orbit of the Presidency of the Nation […] for the purpose of initiating an urgent investigation regarding the launch of the $LIBRA cryptocurrency and all companies or individuals involved in such operation. […] President Milei, who has demonstrated his vocation for the truth, is committed to the proper clarification of this fact to the last consequences.”
https://x.com/OPRArgentina/status/1890937875677495542
The final chapter of this investigation will play out in the courts both within and outside of the Argentine State. It seems unlikely, especially given the state of corruption in the legal system in Argentina, that the presidential office will find against the President himself, if, indeed, Javier Milei is still President. However the private litigation, especially in the United States, will weaken the president and may allow his partners to tie his hands politically for the rest of his term.
Leave a Reply