Keep cutting, Javier: what has changed in Argentina after a year with a ‘crypto president’

In 2023 Javier Milei, the Libertarian Party candidate and a self-styled bitcoin supporter, won Argentina’s presidential election. He is known for declaring his intention to “burn” the country’s central bank and scrap the peso in favour of the US dollar to defeat inflation.

He has yet to take such radical steps. At ForkLog’s request, Oleg Cash Coin examined what Milei’s administration is actually doing in crypto.

Stable instability

Back in 2022 Milei gave an interview in which he said the central bank engages in fraud and in “deceiving good people by means of the inflation tax.” Although he has never proposed adopting the first cryptocurrency as legal tender, as in El Salvador or the Central African Republic, he sees bitcoin as “a return of money to its original creator — the private sector”.

Runaway inflation — more than 250% year-on-year — and a paralysing external debt of about 90% of GDP have created conditions for one of the strongest bottom-up crypto economies. For a vast share of the population, digital assets are routine.

Thus, Bankless co-founder David Hoffman considers support for cryptocurrencies in Argentina to be “higher than anywhere else in the world.” According to Milkroad, the country ranks fourth globally for digital-asset adoption, behind only the UAE, Singapore and Turkey. At least a third of the population uses cryptocurrencies for everyday transactions. A significant share of users are workers in the gig economy.

All this suggests Argentina stands on the cusp of a technological revival, with economic reforms and experiments in digital finance playing a notable part.

The mass turn to cryptocurrencies is closely tied to the peso’s instability, with inflation eroding roughly 10% of its value each month (not year). Even here there is a measure of improvement: monthly inflation has hovered around 4% for several consecutive months, something not seen since early 2022.

This is not just abstract statistics. The country has in practice embraced blockchain as a tool for daily life: from stablecoins that hedge inflation to DeFi applications that provide access to global markets.

As CoinDesk writes, Argentina has shown that cryptocurrency can be a viable alternative to “broken” financial systems.

What has changed in a year

It is still too early to judge the results of Milei’s policies, but the trend suggests Argentina is taking a comprehensive approach, leaning on that bottom‑up support for crypto. The new government almost immediately “ratified and confirmed” that bitcoin may be used as a currency for contracts.

Recent reforms have made it possible to establish entities that operate entirely with cryptocurrencies. In late July, the first such company registered a legal entity with charter capital of 0.00457621 BTC and $194.99 in USDC. All this was enabled by Milei’s initiative to create a multi‑currency environment.

In May 2024 the authorities also said they were consulting El Salvador, which since 2021 has been accumulating experience in crypto regulation with an eye to supporting and developing blockchain innovation.

As in El Salvador, Tether, the issuer of the largest stablecoin USDT, is expanding its presence in Argentina’s crypto market. The company invested $100 million in Adecoagro, the country’s leading producer of milk and rice, acquiring a 9.8% stake.

Adecoagro owns 213,500 hectares of farmland and industrial facilities in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. It produces 2.8 million tonnes of agricultural goods and more than 1 million MWh of renewable energy.

This opens the way for mining and for tokenising real‑world assets (RWA). Adecoagro already holds a minority stake in Agrotoken. According to CoinDesk, the company has concluded grain‑tokenisation deals worth $70 million.

Positive crypto feedback

Alongside rising investment in Argentina’s digital sector, the number of educational events backed by public bodies is growing.

For example, the ETH Kipu Foundation and the Buenos Aires Ministry of Education have agreed a partnership for “blockchain education” in schools. Students in the capital will be able to take internships at relevant projects. The partnership also offers courses in the Solidity programming language used in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Notably, a large part of the crypto community speaks very highly of the current administration — a rarity for government institutions.

“Argentina’s new leader Javier Milei is in many ways deeply crypto‑spiritual. With a new administration that is making radical changes to government, the country’s crypto leaders see a path to permanently embedding cryptocurrencies in the nation’s growth plans for the next decade and beyond,” writes Bankless.

The comment comes under the local Crecimiento initiative, which brings together the crypto community and entrepreneurs working jointly on reforms. And it is not just a local hackathon: the administration appears serious about dialogue.

Interest in cryptocurrencies is not confined to Milei’s team. Former president Mauricio Macri can be seen at thematic events, suggesting a degree of cross‑party consensus within government.

Conclusions

Milei’s provocative conduct during the 2023 campaign, reminiscent of Donald Trump’s antics, might have made his statements and intentions seem unserious.

After 11 months in office, however, a tentative judgment is possible: he is skilfully leveraging the public’s already‑formed appetite for cryptocurrencies to help pull the country out of its economic hole.

No one can be certain that every decision is right, but the past months point to a marked shift towards a symbiosis between the fiat economy and the crypto industry.