Stephen: This is your host, Stephen Sargeant of the Around The Coin Podcast. Today we talk to Mauricio Di Bartolomeo from Ledn. He's the co founder and chief strategy officer of Ledn Inc. We talk about his early days mining Bitcoin in Venezuela and the real deal behind the Petro token released by the government.

We discuss how Bitcoin can solve for hyperinflation and the international use cases for providing financial aid to places like the Ukraine and the Middle East. We talk about Ledn's new and exciting digital asset backed products and services and the new launches that they're coming with. In 2024, and we talk a little bit about how they survived the lending crisis.

We saw in crypto in 2022 and how regulation is impacting how crypto backed assets are used throughout North America and around the world. Stay tuned for this amazing episode with Mauricio.

Welcome back to Around The Coin with your host, Steven Sargent. We have Mauricio Di Bartolomeo. I'm going to try that again. Mauricio Di Bartolomeo. I'm not even going to be able to pronounce your last name properly. Mauricio from Ledn. us a little bit about and what you do at Ledn.

Mauricio: Yes, happy to.

And thanks for having us. My name is Mauricio. As you mentioned, I I say this because it's, it's relevant to Bitcoin. I'm originally from Venezuela. That's where I was born and raised and got my inflation education. and that's where I found Bitcoin or where my family found Bitcoin.

And that made a big impact on me because at the time my family finds Bitcoin. Venezuela was sinking into authoritarianism and hyperinflation and everybody was leaving. And to me, it made a really, really lasting impression when my youngest brother starts mining. And he started growing his mind and building his business at a time when everyone around him was leaving.

And to see The expressions in people's faces and how their lives changed when they started mining and when they started being able to buy Bitcoin and transact in Bitcoin, because at the time. It was illegal to buy dollars in Venezuela to protect your savings from inflation. It was illegal to turn your bolivares into either dollars or tires for bartering or you know, buying tuna cans, anything that wasn't a bolivar because a bolivar would basically melt.

And they, they made any type of transaction where you were exchanging bolivares for something that would be able to retain its wealth. They made those things illegal. And so they were forcing people into poverty and you could see it in people's faces and they were searching for protection, turning every stone to find a place to hide.

And when you, when they found Bitcoin, you could see their expression, their demeanor, everything changed. And them being able to. Sustain themselves and earn this thing that where you were no longer running to get rid of, you actually wanted to keep it and keep it for as long as you could, and even more of it.

It was a complete shift in how you experience. Day to day life in Venezuela, because the second you got paid, you needed to go get rid of it. But this was the thing where you got paid and you just, you didn't want to get rid of it. You wanted more of it. It instigated savings.

Stephen: And how much of the population were driven to Bitcoin?

Like, you know, even that during that time, Bitcoin probably seemed, maybe like a scam, fake money, especially when you're trying to attain your wealth. Was this a huge community that you felt you and your brother had at the time, or was it still a small sector similar to how, you know, people ran into Bitcoin or went down the rabbit hole here in North America?

Mauricio: So when we started like 2015, it was, it was super niche. Like no, nobody was doing this. It was very difficult to find anybody to talk about mining with or to even show you where they had bought the machines from or how they had installed. There was nothing. We were among the first ones. I think we were the second or third in our, in our city.

To bring in computers and install them. So at the beginning, it was very, very niche, but what I remember distinctly is it's spread like wildfire. from in a matter of months, it went from, nobody knows what this thing is, to. Everybody with an open plug in their homes is looking to put a rig in there.

And this sort of explosion and how consistently people got excited and, and, you know, found opportunity, for me, it was, my aha moment was when my youngest brother was able to sell Bitcoin for bolivares. At the correct Bolivar to dollar rate, not the one the government said, that was fake. You know, you could only get those dollars if you transacted with them, if you were their friends and family and that dollar wasn't available for anybody.

for him to have taken a good, that was say, you know, let's just say 10 dollars worth of Bitcoin at the time in Venezuela, to make this abundantly clear, the government says that you can buy a dollar for 10 bolivares, okay, at a outrageously low rate. Right? Why they, why do they do this? Because all of their official numbers are marked in bolivares.

So when they publish their minimum wage to the United Nations, You know, when you have a thousand divided by 10, oh my goodness, what a wonderful country you are. But if you try to actually go buy a dollar in the open market, people will sell it to you for 500 bolivares. From 10 to 500 is a huge delta, right?

And then when you try to divide your thousand bolivare minimum wage over 500, it's 2. You are the most impoverished country in the world. So they, for very selfish reasons, they set this at artificially low rates. But if you, as a user, as a citizen, wants to want to go buy a dollar for 10 bolivares, Nobody will sell it to you.

what my brother did at the time, just so that everyone's clear, is he took 10 worth of Bitcoin and was able to sell them for 5, 000 bolivares. Not for the 50 that the government said, for the actual exchange rate that you would get for a dollar in the open market. When he did that transaction, that was my aha moment, because there was no other good.

In the country that you could do that with. half a decade, like for the better, like for three to four years and during inflation, everybody was searching for that answer. I saw it with my own two eyes in that room. And that conviction stays with me until today. my conviction on Bitcoin is unshakable because I've seen it do what it did in the darkest times, in the darkest countries.

the way Bitcoin wins is not necessarily by getting us an ETF approved. The way Bitcoin wins is by giving the option to opt out of our authoritarianism and horrible monetary policy to billions of people. And it is doing that very well.

Stephen: And what were the rigs like?

Stephen: I'm trying to picture, I'm a visual person, I'm trying to picture this.

What were the rigs like? I think in 2015, you might have been able to get away with a car some kind of card for the computer. But I think you would have had mining rigs, and then if it is mining rigs, if you can even trade money or bolivars for tires, how are you getting rigs into the country?

What was that process like?

Mauricio: Yes. So the, at the time there were S5s and the new S7s the S7s were, I think, just coming out of the oven. And a lot of people were doing Ethereum GPU rigs. Okay. Cause Ethereum GPU rigs are, are easier to put together. You know, they, they didn't have to come from the particular factory.

They were fast. You could put them together in a faster timeframe and they were much quieter and they emit a lot less heat. So for home mining, rigs are actually better than, or were back when Ethereum was in proof of work. No longer the case. those were the rigs that that was the equipment at the time, the way people would bring them in was Bitmain.

So you would basically send it over to Bitmain, Bitmain would send it to you in a container. And not in a, in a, in a container, you buy a piece of the container, right? And so they would ship it to you and it would take about nine months to arrive. the interesting thing is that importing the products was not that difficult.

You would just have to pay Bitmain and you would put in your shipping address. And in fact, I believe Bitmain would ship via DHL. that was not an issue on that front. Because nothing was illegal. Everything was legal. So it would come through customs. You would pay whatever taxes you were to pay and you would install the machines after they would arrive.

Because of the long delays in the Bitcoin equipment, a lot of people went to mine Ethereum and other GPU based assets. And for this, they would build card rigs. So, you know, the, the standard eight card or six card rigs that you see. actually, I would say Ethereum was, it was probably 50 50 in terms of the equipment people used.

Stephen: That makes sense. And I think at that time, you know, a lot of the manufacturers, I'm not saying Bitmain specifically, but a lot of manufacturers were running the cards, like they were running the machine, mining their own Bitcoin before they were sending it to the customers. So I think that had a lot to do.

With the delays as well. But what was the electricity bills? Like, like I'm really trying to picture an impoverished country. How are you affording electricity bills? Was electricity cheap? Like, how are you maintaining these, these rigs?

Mauricio: So the key thing with Venezuela was that these type of populist governments, they instill or institute all sorts of wonky subsidies It can distort, you know, economic reality in many ways. So in Venezuela, to put it in context electricity was heavily subsidized. It still is today, but back at, back at the time you could pay for the, the hydropower of a four bedroom house would cost you probably 2 a month. So it was, it was effectively free you know, the power was effectively free and the internet was also pretty heavily subsidized. it was

Stephen: what happened to the people that didn't go to Bitcoin? Like what happened? What was, was there any other alternatives? Like, what were people doing with this, you know, the hyperinflation, you know, their, their dollars, pennies on the dollars if they had to kind of, transfer it or trade it for any other currencies around the world, what was other people's options, or was Bitcoin really the only savior at the time?

Mauricio: people were leaving. Like there were, you know, there Venezuela is the largest migration crisis in America's in, in continental America's history. Venezuela has had 7 million people leave since 2016. Since 2015. Actually, it's a country of 30 million people to put it in context, for 7 million to have left out of 30.

is a massive number. We're talking almost 33 percent of the country left. Out of my 10 best friends from high school, seven of us are out, you know, three are left, and so the option was to liquidate your life work.

Stephen: Where were people going to? Was there a certain place that people really loved going to that was either the majority of the population, like a neighboring country, or people were trying to like get to North America or other places maybe in Europe or Asia?

Where were people migrating to the most?

Mauricio: The two biggest destinations were Miami and Madrid. Those are the two biggest destinations, Miami, because it's the sort of capital of Latin America. You know, everybody in Venezuela at some, at some point in their lives, dreams of living in Florida or the US.

And so that was a big. destination, but for that you needed a visa and a lot of money. And so that was not available for everybody. one thing is one thing to go. It's a very different thing to be able to go. Because once your country gets a bit of a name for people wanting to leave, visa restrictions increase.

It becomes harder for you to go into different places and and I, and I lived through that. So at the beginning, people were like trying to pick, right? Because immigration brain drain happens in an interesting way, right? Like brain drain starts from the top to the bottom. the first people to see the issue coming are usually very smart, very prepared, very wealthy.

They have visas. So they leave by plane. It's a very prepared migration. They have a job when they land. It's a, Plan transition, right? Then you start getting closer to the line where things start, you know, and then at this point people start saying, okay, well, how can I leave? And then, and then the, the saying goes, then you start leaving by car.

So then you start leaving to the neighboring countries, to the Colombias of the world, to the Brazils of the world. But then you start leaving, then, then the V's, then all those countries get shut down. So then you have to start leaving by foot. And that's when you get to El Darien. So I'm not sure if you're familiar with the, Thousands of people that have died trying to cross the Darien jungle from Venezuela over to Panama because it's the only way to walk over to the U.

S. And people are literally dying by the thousands. Trying to cross to leave Venezuela to get to the U S it's no different than people trying to risk their lives on a boat to sail from Cuba to the U S.

Stephen: And Mexico. And yeah, it's just deadly passages.

Stephen: I don't think we could talk about Venezuela and cryptocurrency and not talk about the Petro.

Uh, Was, was the Petro the first CBDC? Like what was the view about the Petro from Venezuela? Was it just like, kind of like another propaganda mechanism? For those that actually live in the country, it doesn't seem like it picked up much steam, other than maybe the government's using it. What was your thought?

Were you there when the petrol was unveiled and what was your thought about it?

Mauricio: So, I was already here in Canada and but I was going back and forth still a lot. To me, and I've written about this I wrote a piece that I'm going to give my, give away my, my views. But it's, the piece I wrote is called "The Petro is a Scam -Here's Why."

I still, I still hold that view. The Petro combined the worst aspects of an ICO with the worst aspects of a CBDC. So it was an attempt for the Venezuelan government to try to dupe the world population to trade their Bitcoin and their, their valuable Bitcoin and stable coins for their smoke and mirrors.

Which is when you read the actual Petro papers, it says that the government of Venezuela, nonetheless, guarantees that each Petro will be backed by quote, A barrel of oil this many grams of gold, but here's where it gets interesting, or quote, whatever the Venezuelan government deems appropriate.

So if you've been, if you're familiar with who these people are you know, you, you, you can't put a cent of legitimacy on this thing, right? And so what they were trying to do was get people from all over the world to trade Bitcoin, like basically to fund them, right? To fund their project and to circumvent sanctions.

Because at the time they were sanctioned to the teeth and so they couldn't get any funding. And so they were basically trying to get funding and they were seeing all these ICOs raise money left, right, and center. And they're like, Oh yeah, why don't we say to the world that there's going to be some oil here backing this?

And yeah, let's go out and try to see who, who bites. That was really it.

Mauricio: But then it had a second. Actually it had three, three prongs. It was an ICO. It was an attempt at A-C-B-D-C, and it was a propaganda mechanism to go after miners locally. Mm-Hmm. . And so the back to the piece around the CBDC and this connects to the miners as well.

the petrol was never intended to be a public blockchain. They, there was no mining going on for the petro. You couldn't mine this. It was a completely centralized database yet. In the petro promotional events that they held, all they were showing was mining machines. And so they were basically touring everybody and educating them around what an ASIC was and what a GPU rig was.

And basically, between the lines, these conventions or presentations were like, this is an S5. It produces roughly 300 to 400 dollars per month. This is the sound that it makes. This is the heat profile that it makes. This is how you could potentially find it with a heat sensor. This is how you could potentially find it with a tiering sensor.

This is how you could potentially find it by measuring the electricity loads. Lo and behold Within four days or five days of these promotional campaigns, my minor friends and ourselves started getting knocks on the door from these random people who were dressed as utility workers or, you know, local government officials to check, to check the little payment of your last municipal thing.

And, oh, oh, just to, just to take a read at your power meter, and then long, shortly after that, everybody's minds start getting raided. Everybody starts trying to get extorted. People start legitimate, like literally coming in and stealing people's equipment. And so that happened to a lot of my friends.

Eventually it happened to us. And that is when my family decides to finally leave the country for good. Of course, all of those machines and all of those operations were legal. Every single person that had issues back then had those charges dropped, including us. There was no wrongdoing. With time, obviously four years later, it was found that there was no, nothing illegal about what we did.

but it was an attempt at extorting people. And there's a bigger background to that. Which is that the Venezuelan government needs to give handouts to its cronies. And every year it did this in a different way. And when it came the Christmas of 2017 came, there was no other company or industry in the country that had imported a significant amount of assets that you could go raid.

But when they were looking at the import records, they saw this thing called Bitmain. And they, they saw a lot of people brought things by Bitmain. And then when they connected the dots They're like, we got to go find these things.

Stephen: That makes a lot of sense. And I think this is funny because this is what led you kind of, it feels like the ethos behind where you are now in co founding Ledn.

Where now you're using crypto to help people instead of what you've seen probably the majority of your early days in crypto. Which is where it's been used to save people and where, you know, the government intervention was a lot more and a lot harsher.

Stephen: You come to Canada. Tell us a little bit about Ledn.

Ledn, what kind of drove you to build this product and these services for canadians?

Mauricio: Yes. So the first one I will say is early on, I knew that I didn't, I wanted to spend as long as I could, if possible, the rest of my life in Bitcoin to have the biggest impact. In Bitcoin or in any business, that wasn't going to happen out of Venezuela just because it was going to be very difficult to get funding.

It was very difficult to get anybody to believe that we could do something with so much against us. You know, you have the entire system against you. It's a very difficult place to build a business, especially a world class business. And so we, I knew it couldn't be in Venezuela. So the first thing was leaving Venezuela again and, and deciding to do it.

Not where I could, not where my family was, not where power was free, you know, not that wasn't going to be my solution. I needed to figure out something else to contribute. And it had to be more than connecting a machine into a wall because I didn't make the machine and the person selling me the power wasn't me either.

So I wasn't, I was basically bound to get squeezed eventually, but it was what he knew what to do. So. I wanted to keep mining. So I set up my rigs in Canada. I set up a small mining facility in Canada. And I convinced Adam, my business partner today and best friend from university. he had been financing renewable energy for 10 years.

And when I came to Canada, I said, I need cheap power. And he says, what do you need cheap power for? And so I said, I'm mining Bitcoin. He's like, tell me more. And so we start talking about mining Bitcoin. And then at the beginning, early days, we were trying to figure out a way of. Institutionalizing mining in Canada.

And so we were talking to the really big Hydro Québec and big real estate owners. And we were very close. Through that process, a couple of things happened. Interestingly, we were helping a lot of miners nobody wanted to sell their Bitcoin, everybody wanted to grow their mine, including us.

And so in that process, we said we don't wanna sell the Bitcoin to grow the mine. We should be able to get a loan backed by the Bitcoin so that we can buy more equipment and keep the upside. Brilliant,

Stephen: Brilliant.

Mauricio: It's a no-brainer. Everybody should be willing to lend us money on this, on this premise. The first guy we, the first group we went to, Bitcoin's not an asset.

What are you talking about? Bitcoin's not an asset. Who's gonna do that? Second guy? Why would anyone do that? Third guy. It's not an asset, you know? Fourth group, not an asset. And at that point we looked at each other. You know, he had been financing renewable energy for 10 years. I had been dealing in Bitcoin at the time for now three to four years.

And so we looked at each other and we said, no, like these guys are so short sighted. If we solve this problem, we're going to do great. Like if we can actually figure this out. And why did we need to do that? Well, we put our heads together. So why do you need to run a lending operation? Well, you need to keep the Bitcoin safe.

We need a custodian. Great. Well, what else do you need? Well, you need to be able to trade out of the Bitcoin if the Bitcoin price goes down and we don't get more collateral. Okay. So we need to connect to an exchange. And so then, so, oh, we need to build a tech platform so that people can give us their instructions.

And so then we put the pillars together, raise a little bit of money. And in Ledn was created in August, 2018.

Mauricio: And in December 2018, we issued Canada's first Bitcoin back loan. And that to me is one of the things that fills me the most with pride to say that we were the first people to do something so meaningful for this country.

And to me, it was a big moment and that was a very simple premise. We believe, very basic thought, if Bitcoin is to become a reserve asset. You're going to need to borrow against it. There is no other reserve asset that you do not borrow against. You borrow against a phone to buy it and tell us, why couldn't you borrow against a Bitcoin?

And so it just made absolute sense for us. And you know, the general thesis of Ledn is we are transparent, we are simple, and we solve a tangible problem that you have today. It's not some abstract use case in some blockchain in the cloud, where you're going to hop to four abstract things. you got a bill.

You need to pay it or you find an opportunity to invest. You look at your portfolio, you have your Bitcoin, but you don't want to sell it, but you don't want to miss this opportunity.

Stephen: And it seems like there's a huge market share for that. I think, I don't know what the stats are exactly, but I think, you know, over the last bear market, 70 percent of people have not sold or moved their Bitcoin around.

And it's probably because of services like yours. It's like, I want to keep the upside of it, I believe in it, but I also need money to finance other operations, other businesses, my day to day life.

Stephen: But as a compliance professional with my background, what were the regulatory, what are still the regulatory challenges?

What were the hurdles, especially in Canada securing banking relationships and partners? Give us, you know, maybe a wide scope of the overview of how challenging it was to be the first. To issue these crypto backed loans.

Mauricio: Yeah. So there was a lot of legal work, a lot of lawyers, a lot of consultations. The first thing was obviously making sure that the product was compliant and that we were able to offer it with no issues. So that took a bit of work and discovery. I call it with the, with our legal team to basically put draft and put together an agreement that had the right thresholds that we also had to model.

You know, what those thresholds would be, you know, at what point would we ask people to come with more collaterals so we'd have to talk to a bunch of clients and say, you know, what would be a great experience for you? You know, and so there was, there was the iteration around the product structure.

Then there was the iteration around. Okay. Can we legally offer the product? Great. Then you have to say, okay, how do I comply with the series of regulators that may be overlooked overseeing this? So then you go into, okay, well, I need to comply with FinTrack. So you set up an account with FinTrack, the equivalent of FinCEN.

And FinTrack has, you need to have an AML program to follow. And so, you know, you need to, you need to hire an AML consultant to do the ML program. So the, the, the basic steps are. Do you have the the legal infrastructure to offer this, right? Do you have the capital to lend once you get a demand for a loan?

Cause that's when, then we have to go out and raise the money to, to lend. Right? Then of course, do you have the right team? Because as this thing grows, you're going to need to have operations, client success. You need to, you may need to have a marketing team. You can think about the, the marketing can come after, but the sort of basic operations that you're going to need, you have to tick those boxes.

Mauricio: you know, I remember the first interactions that you have with, say, you know, an investor or a regulator, and you're telling them what you want and what you want to do or your plan, and at the beginning You know, people were, because it was less, less known you know, on the investor side, it would require a lot more explanation because there was a lot more unknowns on that front.

On the FinTrack side of the house and all those other things, they didn't really, crypto wasn't really in anybody's radar. So they, it was, it was actually easier, I would say, to, to do certain things. It was now, no, fast forward now. There's a lot less explanation that you have to do to investors.

Everybody gets it now. It's sort of like they understand it. And regulators do too. So now there's more scrutiny around anything from a regulatory side, but there's less effort around investors, if that makes sense.

Stephen: Now talk to me about the banking partners, because I think if you live in Canada, North America, we all know the banks are really the de facto regulator, because the regulators can put in the requirements, thresholds, but the banks can make those thresholds and requirements a lot higher because they're the ones absorbing the risk and offering you the bank account, which is much needed in North America.

How were they then maybe compared to now, or was there anything that was like a sticking point where they just couldn't get past, that they really struggled with understanding when it came to crypto backed assets?

Mauricio: No, I think, you know, what I can say is it's been disappointing to say the least to see the actions of Canadian banks towards this industry.

I would say that the crypto industry is here despite not having support of local banking, not because of support from local banking. I think it has. Severely hindered Canada's ability to innovate and to foster entrepreneurship in this industry, and it will continue to do so. it's, it's one of those things that we as Canadians should be embarrassed about, frankly.

So I, I don't have a lot of good things to say to be honest with you about the, the support that the Canadian banks have given this industry. I would say that. For a while, the U S filled those shoes. But that was up until that side of the house also became incredibly constrained. And so, with all that said, I still think the U S is a lot more welcoming in terms of banking to crypto businesses than Canada.

And I think if Canada doesn't fix that soon. It will be at a material disadvantage to the rest of the world when, as it relates to crypto.

Stephen: And we see in the U. S. they just have a lot more options. Europe has like, you know, kind of like bank adjacent services that you can offer and not call yourself an actual bank.

Whereas Canada, if you're not getting in with one of the big tiered banks there's very little options for you to do a significant amount of business. And I think that goes across the board, not just crypto. You know, MSBs will tell you the same thing. Cannabis companies will tell you the exact same thing.

Self employed people will tell you the exact same thing of how hard it is to keep a banking relationship as a business owner and much less someone using those business services. You know, you know, two years ago trying to buy an NFT and transferring funds using my Scotia credit card they weren't too lenient, let's just say, on how quickly they'll freeze up those credit cards until you provide them an explanation of buying 500 worth of NFTs.

So definitely a challenging market definitely some hindrances. And I think you're right.

Stephen: I think, you know, people are banging down the doors of open banking and open banking protocols in, in Canada. We need to get there soon. Otherwise, a lot of these businesses won't be here very long.

Stephen: And to that point, maybe talk about Ledn's exposure now and moving their headquarters.

To Grand Cayman or Cayman Islands and your exposure around the world where you still have services here in Canada. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

Mauricio: Yes, happy to. So, obviously, with everything that's happened in 2022 and mostly 2022, 2023 has been a year of rebuilding. But with everything that happened in 2022, transparency, accountability, and regulation.

are top of mind for clients and they should be also for businesses and it has been for Ledn. So at Ledn, we have always taken a lot of pride in our regulatory posture and our transparency and accountability and a testament to that was the fact that Earlier this year, we got, we received approval from SEMA, the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, to register as a virtual asset service provider.

And this is, I believe the first license that the SEMA has ever granted to a lender. And it is something that we are incredibly proud of. And because we received this This license, this regulatory framework that also allows us to operate and service our global clients. We basically moved Ledn's global headquarters from Canada to the Cayman Islands.

And so right now, when you interact with Ledn, you're interacting with our new entity, Ledn Cayman Sisa, which is a regulated entity under SEMA. this is something that we have been working on for 18 months leading up to the decision. It is it's, it's been excellent working with SEMA.

They have been incredibly diligent, and I am very excited about You know, the, the future of regulation around this this industry. And I think that, you know, not surprisingly, it has been the countries that are hungry for this industry that have moved faster than others to attract this type of business because they see.

This is something that has an immense amount of potential and they, you know, a lot of jurisdictions are looking to become or want to become the New York of crypto, if you would. And so, you know, you, you, when, when Ledn made its announcement. That we received our Cayman Vast. It was funny because during that same week, Gemini announced its entity in Singapore and Coinbase announced its entity in BVI, or I think I might've gotten those two switched over.

But basically, for most companies at scale, it, it makes a lot of sense to set up a, a headquarter where there is a clear regulatory framework and where you are welcome and, and, you know, Almost incentivize to operate globally out of there.

Stephen: And it makes sense because those countries are focused.

A lot of their income comes from servicing global institutions, global organizations, and global banks. So they have to be a little bit more welcoming. Whereas Canada is like, well, we're focused on Canadians. We don't have to worry about opening up our arms or opening up. You know, our regulatory system to other parts of the world where those countries are definitely focused about global servicing, globally, customers.

Stephen: And, you know, I think a big part, and you mentioned globally, a big part of, I believe the ethos when it comes to Ledn is financial inclusion. I'd actually just got off a recording with Brett King a futurist, you know, big in the fintech world. And we talked about, you know, are we reducing the numbers in financial inclusion?

He was saying up to 20 percent of Americans are still underbanked or unbanked. When you think about places like Africa and around the world, that number probably rises even with technology and things like M Pesa. What are your thoughts? What do we need? And what his point was is that it doesn't matter the access to these technologies and the platforms KYC are still going to, you know, a digital identities or identification is always going to be a hurdle for a lot of these people.

And that's why the number is not being reduced. What are your thoughts about financial inclusion and what lending can do in other countries can do to help low and maybe some of the burden on users and customers?

Mauricio: I mean, I have a bit of a different view in that I do believe that the work that Bitcoin is doing, and frankly, a lot of the work that Ledn does, is financial inclusion in action today.

I'll give you a couple of examples. We have many clients at Ledn that have written to us saying that we are the first loan they've ever been approved for. So these are clients in places, in remote places of Latin America. We can get a loan. In a remote part of a country like Columbia, funded in less than 24 hours.

Sometimes people in these towns don't even have a local bank branch to go to. A lot of times these banks, these local banks don't even have online internet, like online banking infrastructure, and it may be, they do. But if you are Latino, like I am, and your family has lost all of their savings once or twice before, because some bank went under or, or, or the government called your bank and said free withdrawals are frozen, which happens often.

iT's like the world cup. I say it's like the world cup. It happens every four years in Venezuela. we don't trust local banks. It doesn't matter what you tell me. Even if you're across the street from my house, I do not trust you to hold my dollars. And I will certainly not trust you to hold my Bitcoin.

there could be, there can be technology, there can be infrastructure, but there is no trust. now that's, that's the sort of level one of banking. So when people talk about banking the unbanked, just because you have a bank account in Venezuela, you're not connected to the world. you're connected to some intranetwork that is useless because nobody can send in and out of things in and out of.

So there's this tendency to say that a bank account is this ubiquitous thing that, Oh, everybody has a bank. You're banked now. it's not banked. A person with a a government bank account a government bank, bank account in Venezuela is not banked. They're not banked in the way a person with a JP Morgan account is.

That's not the same. first of all, I would, I would challenge this definition of banked, like what is banked? In today's day and age, I think banked is having a self custodial wallet, like, and access to a service like and yes, that's going to require KYC to interact with Ledn. But there are alternatives where you can go with no KYC, but that requires a lot more technical knowledge, et cetera.

Right? So yes, I think we're making a dent in banking to unbanked, a massive dent on banking to unbanked, right? There's, there's, there's several challenges with banking to unbanked.

Mauricio: And I think one is. Education. Okay. Like the number one will be education because even though we're going to be here telling you, come bank or no, let, and we'll help you get a loan.

Let it, we'll help you earn interest. Ledn, we'll help you keep your assets safe. We'll be doing that, but don't forget there's a massive propaganda machine locally from the government banging the opposite drum. Right? And so it's a battle and it's a battle that is, you know, the battleground for it is education, right?

And the battleground for it is people's testing and people's experience. 'cause once people in Venezuela found Bitcoin and they, and they transacted in it and they used it. They wouldn't listen to anybody that tells you it's bad. Like you just like, it's like me when somebody says, Mao, Bitcoin's dead. I'm like, ha ha ha.

Like an actual laugh comes out, emanates from my body. Right. Because it's like, you're so ridiculous.

Stephen: And I think you make a great point about the bank. Yeah. I think people in Nigeria would agree with you. Having a bank account doesn't mean much if they can't get access. US Dollars or pay merchants around the world, or it takes three months to get money.

And even then you don't know if it's guaranteed that you can get a certain amount. So I think you raise a great point is even if we're not reducing the numbers, being banked isn't exactly you know, that kind of level that we're trying to reach. And you're talking about Columbia, you're talking about markets.

Where Chainalysis has reported these are emerging grassroots adoption markets for Bitcoin and for probably all the reasons that you've covered. Maybe just talk a little bit about the products and services. If I'm just finding out about Ledn, I'm Canadian so we love Ledn, I think, in Canada. But if we're just saying like, hey, we don't really have Bitcoin or we have a little bit of Bitcoin.

What are some of the services that you offer so people can get an understanding of what range of products and services that you're offering, you know, crypto newbies and existing crypto holders?

Mauricio: Definitely. So at Ledn, it's in our name, our specialty is lending. And so the, our flagship product is dollar loans.

With Bitcoin as collateral. So this is a product that you can use to get dollars or stable coins sent to you within 24 hours, if you need dollars and don't want to sell your Bitcoin. So why do people use these services? Many times it's to divest into a different asset. So they have a stack of Bitcoin, but they found their dream house.

So they borrow against their Bitcoin to make their down payment. Or they you know, they saved enough Bitcoin and they want to start their own business. They borrow against their Bitcoin to fund that business. Those are the main ones. A lot of people borrow against their Bitcoin to buy more Bitcoin.

And we have a product for that called B2X. It's our most popular product. So you, we have two types of loans, which are our standard loans, which means you can use them to get the cash use for whatever you want. But then we have a loan that, you know, you can bring Bitcoin to let in. And then with a few clicks, we double that Bitcoin for you with a loan on the backend, right?

So that product is called B2X. So those are the two kind of core lending products to borrow against. And then we are also going to be supporting Ethereum backed loans earlier in 2024. That was, that's the core of the lending product. Then there's also the ability for you to earn interest. So you can deposit either Bitcoin.

Or stable coins that Ledn U-S-C-C-U-S-C-T or even Ethereum to earn interest on that Bitcoin or on those dollars. And that is called our growth accounts. So for our growth accounts, to give you an example, we're paying 8.5% on US dollar stable coins. So you can come and earn eight point half percent on U US dollar stable coins at lead, how we're able to pay that 8.5%.

It's because the loans that we are issuing to the people that don't want to sell that Bitcoin, they are borrowing those dollars, they are paying 12. 4%. So it's, that's what allows us to take a spread and pay out the eight and a half. And that's something that I will say is that not all lending platforms operate in the same manner or have the same risk management policies or transparency policies than we do as 2022 showed us.

One of the things that Ledn is incredibly proud of and is one of our differentiators is our proof of reserves. So every six months we have an accountant that comes in to let and certify public accountant. They get a basically a report of all the balances that we owe to our clients. And they also get to see the balances we have in custody, exchanges, lending agreements et cetera. And they make sure that we have enough assets to cover our liabilities.

Stephen: And I think that transparency is important, showing people kind of breaking it down because people saw high yields. People saw high returns, whether it was you know, algorithmic stable coins, whether it was, you know, FTX, which were, you know, 3AC, we're trying to move ahead of, I think, transparency and, you know, the knowledge of what is happening with the Bitcoin, what you're doing.

That, you know, B2X product sounds like a winner. Boring Bitcoin to buy more Bitcoin just seems like something HODLers would do. And during a market like we've had in the last 18 months, it seems like it would probably be flying off the shelves.

Stephen: What are your thoughts, and I know we only have a couple minutes left, but what are your thoughts about the future of crypto?

More importantly, like real world assets, you're in, you know, kind of a digital asset class right now. What are your thoughts about real world asset tokenization, putting things like bonds and real estate? Is this going to be something that you offer in the future? Is this something that you're, that you're seeing your customers are demanding?

What are your thoughts on kind of this? Real world asset tokenization that's happening and that's gotten the industry extremely excited about over the last 12

months.

Mauricio: Love that topic. Before I touch on that, I forgot to mention one last product, which is our dual cryptocurrency nodes, which is a product that effectively lets you earn interest also on your Bitcoin on USDC.

But this is done not by lending, but by you. Deciding to potentially sell your Bitcoin at a predefined price on a predefined day. and similar to buy Bitcoin. So this product lets you sell Bitcoin at a higher price that it is that it is today, or potentially buy Bitcoin at a lower price than it is today. And you get interest depending on the outcomes.

You can read more. It's a bit of a complex product to explain in a, in a, in a sound bite, but you can check it out every like it's, it's, people love it. So, and I do too. But to your point about real world assets. I do think that this is going to be a big thing in the coming years. An example of this at Ledn is this idea of our, well, our Bitcoin mortgage product.

So this is a product, we already have a product that takes a digital asset and a physical asset and combines them as collateral. It's called the Bitcoin mortgage. So we actually pioneered this. We, we announced the world's first Bitcoin mortgage back in December, 2021. And that product's live in Ontario.

You know, we've issued mortgage, which is a pretty exciting thing to say. But I think this is the beginning of a trend. So, I foresee lending against a blend of Bitcoin and real estate as a very big opportunity. Something that we're already working on. This may also expand to say, you know, borrowing against a tokenized bond or borrowing against tokenized gold.

These types of, Systems, I think you're going to have to still figure out a few things on the custody side of the house and the operational side of the house and also the regulatory side of the house, because and the other thing I will say is that this, this real world asset phenomenon can only be driven by centralized providers.

Why? Because no real decentralized product protocol can go to a registry. To confirm ownership of something. It just doesn't work that way if you're truly decentralized, right? And so I believe that it is going to be the centralized offerers that are going to take the baton here and have to build this out to what it can be.

Stephen: I love that. And I think it makes sense.

Stephen: And I think, you know, what are your thoughts about NFTs? Could people then get loans against their NFTs or is that market maybe a little too unstable to provide that kind of assurance for customers?

Mauricio: I think, you know, will that come eventually, you know, I still think right now the liquidity is still, know, people are still trying to sort out the liquidity.

You saw some of those projects come out last cycle. I don't think they're around right now because, because of the same reasons. And so it's always exciting as a founder to look at the upside. At Ledn, we've always looked down first and then up, right? And so first it's like, how do we absolutely make sure we can protect people's capital and how do we make sure that there is, you know, that we've managed through every edge case and that we have the liquidity.

We have been through the darkest hours in Bitcoin and we've been able to sell whatever we need to sell. And it's gone through liquid and it's, it's been, it's been tested and it's as bad a test as it can be. NFTs failed their first test last cycle. And so will they pass the next one? Probably. And eventually

they will.

Stephen: A camel with a top hat smoking a cigar. It seemed like a great investment to a lot of people. Right.

Stephen: Before we, I know we have two minutes left. Talk to me, I know you've been following, I've been following you on Twitter or X and you've been watching closely, and I guess for all the reasons you talked about in this episode, the Argentinian election, they just announced a president, I believe it's called there, in Argentina, that is pro Bitcoin, pro getting rid of the central banks, If you had to wrap up your thoughts in two minutes, why is this important for South and Central America and around the world?

Mauricio: Very good point and something that is going to be very hard for me to say in two minutes because I have too much to say. But Javier Millet was elected president on Sunday. Javier Millet is a pro Bitcoin candidate. He is not pro Bitcoin in the way many people think he is. He's not going to come out and make Bitcoin legal tender like Bukele did.

That is actually not his plan. His plan is to eliminate the peso, shut down the Argentinian central bank and eliminate legal tender laws altogether. Meaning. That you and me are going to be able to transact and set up a contract in any asset we want. And the quote from their congresswoman most recently said, if anybody wants to make a legal agreement in Bitcoin, they should be able to do so, and they will be able to do so.

So you're going to be able to legally transact in Bitcoin. And anything else for that matter, stable coins, like anything, everything will be legal tender. From stable coins to Bitcoin to dollars to euros, you'll be able to choose what you want to use.

Stephen: What are your thoughts? Is this going to happen or is this, you know, folklore? Is this going to, does this help them win the race? But dies out in four years when he has to actually implement it?

Mauricio: No, I think he's, I think he implements it. It's been done before. It's been done by Ecuador. It's been done by El Salvador. Both with good examples. Both curbed down inflation from the hundreds to the low twos within years of doing this.

I've written amply about this. You can check out our blog. And I've, I've gone, I've broken down both examples and what happened in each case. I do think that he's going to go through with it. I do think that is going to be great for Argentina. And I think that this is gonna be a lot more relevant than El Salvador for many reasons.

Not a small one, being that Argentina is the 24th largest economy in the world. It's, it's a member of the G 20, it is the FIFA World Cup Soccer Champion. And their top star is literally rewriting soccer history in the us. it, it, the, the, the level of influence that they have both culturally, politically, and economically are gonna make this a much louder bang, I think, that people expect.

Stephen: And I think that's a great place to end off this conversation.

Stephen: And you're right. You can't just, it's not just about finances, it's still about cultural relevance, it's still about influence. Mauricio, thank you so much for this conversation. I can't wait to get you back on the show, you know, maybe post one year and see and catch up and talk about all the things that we've discussed and do a little bit of a recap and see where we are.

Definitely. Yeah. I'm actually working on my 2024 predictions, so we can go through this sometime next year.

We'll talk soon.

Mauricio: Cheers.

Stephen: This is yourhost, Stephen Sargeant of the Around The Coin Podcast. Today we talk toMauricio Di Bartolomeo from Ledn. He's the co founder and chief strategyofficer of Ledn Inc. We talk about his early days mining Bitcoin in Venezuelaand the real deal behind the Petro token released by the government.

We discuss how Bitcoin can solve for hyperinflation and theinternational use cases for providing financial aid to places like the Ukraineand the Middle East. We talk about Ledn's new and exciting digital asset backedproducts and services and the new launches that they're coming with. In 2024,and we talk a little bit about how they survived the lending crisis.

We saw in crypto in 2022 and how regulation is impacting howcrypto backed assets are used throughout North America and around the world.Stay tuned for this amazing episode with Mauricio.

Welcome back to AroundThe Coin with your host, Steven Sargent. We have Mauricio Di Bartolomeo. I'mgoing to try that again. Mauricio Di Bartolomeo. I'm not even going to be ableto pronounce your last name properly. Mauricio from Ledn. us a little bit aboutand what you do at Ledn.

Mauricio: Yes, happyto.

And thanks for having us. My name is Mauricio. As youmentioned, I I say this because it's, it's relevant to Bitcoin. I'm originallyfrom Venezuela. That's where I was born and raised and got my inflationeducation. and that's where I found Bitcoin or where my family found Bitcoin.

And that made a big impact on me because at the time my familyfinds Bitcoin. Venezuela was sinking into authoritarianism and hyperinflationand everybody was leaving. And to me, it made a really, really lastingimpression when my youngest brother starts mining. And he started growing hismind and building his business at a time when everyone around him was leaving.

And to see The expressions in people's faces and how theirlives changed when they started mining and when they started being able to buyBitcoin and transact in Bitcoin, because at the time. It was illegal to buydollars in Venezuela to protect your savings from inflation. It was illegal toturn your bolivares into either dollars or tires for bartering or you know,buying tuna cans, anything that wasn't a bolivar because a bolivar wouldbasically melt.

And they, they made any type of transaction where you wereexchanging bolivares for something that would be able to retain its wealth.They made those things illegal. And so they were forcing people into povertyand you could see it in people's faces and they were searching for protection,turning every stone to find a place to hide.

And when you, when they found Bitcoin, you could see theirexpression, their demeanor, everything changed. And them being able to. Sustainthemselves and earn this thing that where you were no longer running to get ridof, you actually wanted to keep it and keep it for as long as you could, andeven more of it.

It was a complete shift in how you experience. Day to day lifein Venezuela, because the second you got paid, you needed to go get rid of it.But this was the thing where you got paid and you just, you didn't want to getrid of it. You wanted more of it. It instigated savings.

Stephen: And how muchof the population were driven to Bitcoin?

Like, you know, even that during that time, Bitcoin probablyseemed, maybe like a scam, fake money, especially when you're trying to attainyour wealth. Was this a huge community that you felt you and your brother hadat the time, or was it still a small sector similar to how, you know, peopleran into Bitcoin or went down the rabbit hole here in North America?

Mauricio: So when westarted like 2015, it was, it was super niche. Like no, nobody was doing this.It was very difficult to find anybody to talk about mining with or to even showyou where they had bought the machines from or how they had installed. Therewas nothing. We were among the first ones. I think we were the second or thirdin our, in our city.

To bring in computers and install them. So at the beginning, itwas very, very niche, but what I remember distinctly is it's spread likewildfire. from in a matter of months, it went from, nobody knows what thisthing is, to. Everybody with an open plug in their homes is looking to put arig in there.

And this sort of explosion and how consistently people gotexcited and, and, you know, found opportunity, for me, it was, my aha momentwas when my youngest brother was able to sell Bitcoin for bolivares. At thecorrect Bolivar to dollar rate, not the one the government said, that was fake.You know, you could only get those dollars if you transacted with them, if youwere their friends and family and that dollar wasn't available for anybody.

for him to have taken a good, that was say, you know, let'sjust say 10 dollars worth of Bitcoin at the time in Venezuela, to make thisabundantly clear, the government says that you can buy a dollar for 10bolivares, okay, at a outrageously low rate. Right? Why they, why do they dothis? Because all of their official numbers are marked in bolivares.

So when they publish their minimum wage to the United Nations,You know, when you have a thousand divided by 10, oh my goodness, what awonderful country you are. But if you try to actually go buy a dollar in theopen market, people will sell it to you for 500 bolivares. From 10 to 500 is ahuge delta, right?

And then when you try to divide your thousand bolivare minimumwage over 500, it's 2. You are the most impoverished country in the world. Sothey, for very selfish reasons, they set this at artificially low rates. But ifyou, as a user, as a citizen, wants to want to go buy a dollar for 10bolivares, Nobody will sell it to you.

what my brother did at the time, just so that everyone's clear,is he took 10 worth of Bitcoin and was able to sell them for 5, 000 bolivares.Not for the 50 that the government said, for the actual exchange rate that youwould get for a dollar in the open market. When he did that transaction, thatwas my aha moment, because there was no other good.

In the country that you could do that with. half a decade, likefor the better, like for three to four years and during inflation, everybodywas searching for that answer. I saw it with my own two eyes in that room. Andthat conviction stays with me until today. my conviction on Bitcoin isunshakable because I've seen it do what it did in the darkest times, in thedarkest countries.

the way Bitcoin wins is not necessarily by getting us an ETFapproved. The way Bitcoin wins is by giving the option to opt out of ourauthoritarianism and horrible monetary policy to billions of people. And it isdoing that very well.

Stephen: And whatwere the rigs like?

Stephen: I'm tryingto picture, I'm a visual person, I'm trying to picture this.

What were the rigs like? I think in 2015, you might have beenable to get away with a car some kind of card for the computer. But I think youwould have had mining rigs, and then if it is mining rigs, if you can eventrade money or bolivars for tires, how are you getting rigs into the country?

What was that process like?

Mauricio: Yes. Sothe, at the time there were S5s and the new S7s the S7s were, I think, justcoming out of the oven. And a lot of people were doing Ethereum GPU rigs. Okay.Cause Ethereum GPU rigs are, are easier to put together. You know, they, theydidn't have to come from the particular factory.

They were fast. You could put them together in a fastertimeframe and they were much quieter and they emit a lot less heat. So for homemining, rigs are actually better than, or were back when Ethereum was in proofof work. No longer the case. those were the rigs that that was the equipment atthe time, the way people would bring them in was Bitmain.

So you would basically send it over to Bitmain, Bitmain wouldsend it to you in a container. And not in a, in a, in a container, you buy apiece of the container, right? And so they would ship it to you and it wouldtake about nine months to arrive. the interesting thing is that importing theproducts was not that difficult.

You would just have to pay Bitmain and you would put in yourshipping address. And in fact, I believe Bitmain would ship via DHL. that wasnot an issue on that front. Because nothing was illegal. Everything was legal.So it would come through customs. You would pay whatever taxes you were to payand you would install the machines after they would arrive.

Because of the long delays in the Bitcoin equipment, a lot ofpeople went to mine Ethereum and other GPU based assets. And for this, theywould build card rigs. So, you know, the, the standard eight card or six cardrigs that you see. actually, I would say Ethereum was, it was probably 50 50 interms of the equipment people used.

Stephen: That makessense. And I think at that time, you know, a lot of the manufacturers, I'm notsaying Bitmain specifically, but a lot of manufacturers were running the cards,like they were running the machine, mining their own Bitcoin before they weresending it to the customers. So I think that had a lot to do.

With the delays as well. But what was the electricity bills?Like, like I'm really trying to picture an impoverished country. How are youaffording electricity bills? Was electricity cheap? Like, how are youmaintaining these, these rigs?

Mauricio: So the keything with Venezuela was that these type of populist governments, they instillor institute all sorts of wonky subsidies It can distort, you know, economicreality in many ways. So in Venezuela, to put it in context electricity washeavily subsidized. It still is today, but back at, back at the time you couldpay for the, the hydropower of a four bedroom house would cost you probably 2 amonth. So it was, it was effectively free you know, the power was effectivelyfree and the internet was also pretty heavily subsidized. it was

Stephen: whathappened to the people that didn't go to Bitcoin? Like what happened? What was,was there any other alternatives? Like, what were people doing with this, youknow, the hyperinflation, you know, their, their dollars, pennies on thedollars if they had to kind of, transfer it or trade it for any othercurrencies around the world, what was other people's options, or was Bitcoinreally the only savior at the time?

Mauricio: people wereleaving. Like there were, you know, there Venezuela is the largest migrationcrisis in America's in, in continental America's history. Venezuela has had 7million people leave since 2016. Since 2015. Actually, it's a country of 30million people to put it in context, for 7 million to have left out of 30.

is a massive number. We're talking almost 33 percent of thecountry left. Out of my 10 best friends from high school, seven of us are out,you know, three are left, and so the option was to liquidate your life work.

Stephen: Where werepeople going to? Was there a certain place that people really loved going tothat was either the majority of the population, like a neighboring country, orpeople were trying to like get to North America or other places maybe in Europeor Asia?

Where were people migrating to the most?

Mauricio: The twobiggest destinations were Miami and Madrid. Those are the two biggestdestinations, Miami, because it's the sort of capital of Latin America. Youknow, everybody in Venezuela at some, at some point in their lives, dreams ofliving in Florida or the US.

And so that was a big. destination, but for that you needed avisa and a lot of money. And so that was not available for everybody. one thingis one thing to go. It's a very different thing to be able to go. Because onceyour country gets a bit of a name for people wanting to leave, visarestrictions increase.

It becomes harder for you to go into different places and andI, and I lived through that. So at the beginning, people were like trying topick, right? Because immigration brain drain happens in an interesting way,right? Like brain drain starts from the top to the bottom. the first people tosee the issue coming are usually very smart, very prepared, very wealthy.

They have visas. So they leave by plane. It's a very preparedmigration. They have a job when they land. It's a, Plan transition, right? Thenyou start getting closer to the line where things start, you know, and then atthis point people start saying, okay, well, how can I leave? And then, and thenthe, the saying goes, then you start leaving by car.

So then you start leaving to the neighboring countries, to theColombias of the world, to the Brazils of the world. But then you startleaving, then, then the V's, then all those countries get shut down. So thenyou have to start leaving by foot. And that's when you get to El Darien. So I'mnot sure if you're familiar with the, Thousands of people that have died tryingto cross the Darien jungle from Venezuela over to Panama because it's the onlyway to walk over to the U.

S. And people are literally dying by the thousands. Trying tocross to leave Venezuela to get to the U S it's no different than people tryingto risk their lives on a boat to sail from Cuba to the U S.

Stephen: And Mexico.And yeah, it's just deadly passages.

Stephen: I don'tthink we could talk about Venezuela and cryptocurrency and not talk about thePetro.

Uh, Was, was the Petro the first CBDC? Like what was the viewabout the Petro from Venezuela? Was it just like, kind of like anotherpropaganda mechanism? For those that actually live in the country, it doesn'tseem like it picked up much steam, other than maybe the government's using it.What was your thought?

Were you there when the petrol was unveiled and what was yourthought about it?

Mauricio: So, I wasalready here in Canada and but I was going back and forth still a lot. To me,and I've written about this I wrote a piece that I'm going to give my, giveaway my, my views. But it's, the piece I wrote is called "The Petro is aScam -Here's Why."

I still, I still hold that view. The Petro combined the worstaspects of an ICO with the worst aspects of a CBDC. So it was an attempt forthe Venezuelan government to try to dupe the world population to trade theirBitcoin and their, their valuable Bitcoin and stable coins for their smoke andmirrors.

Which is when you read the actual Petro papers, it says thatthe government of Venezuela, nonetheless, guarantees that each Petro will bebacked by quote, A barrel of oil this many grams of gold, but here's where itgets interesting, or quote, whatever the Venezuelan government deemsappropriate.

So if you've been, if you're familiar with who these people areyou know, you, you, you can't put a cent of legitimacy on this thing, right?And so what they were trying to do was get people from all over the world totrade Bitcoin, like basically to fund them, right? To fund their project and tocircumvent sanctions.

Because at the time they were sanctioned to the teeth and sothey couldn't get any funding. And so they were basically trying to get fundingand they were seeing all these ICOs raise money left, right, and center. Andthey're like, Oh yeah, why don't we say to the world that there's going to besome oil here backing this?

And yeah, let's go out and try to see who, who bites. That wasreally it.

Mauricio: But then ithad a second. Actually it had three, three prongs. It was an ICO. It was anattempt at A-C-B-D-C, and it was a propaganda mechanism to go after minerslocally. Mm-Hmm. . And so the back to the piece around the CBDC and thisconnects to the miners as well.

the petrol was never intended to be a public blockchain. They,there was no mining going on for the petro. You couldn't mine this. It was acompletely centralized database yet. In the petro promotional events that theyheld, all they were showing was mining machines. And so they were basicallytouring everybody and educating them around what an ASIC was and what a GPU rigwas.

And basically, between the lines, these conventions orpresentations were like, this is an S5. It produces roughly 300 to 400 dollarsper month. This is the sound that it makes. This is the heat profile that itmakes. This is how you could potentially find it with a heat sensor. This ishow you could potentially find it with a tiering sensor.

This is how you could potentially find it by measuring theelectricity loads. Lo and behold Within four days or five days of thesepromotional campaigns, my minor friends and ourselves started getting knocks onthe door from these random people who were dressed as utility workers or, youknow, local government officials to check, to check the little payment of yourlast municipal thing.

And, oh, oh, just to, just to take a read at your power meter,and then long, shortly after that, everybody's minds start getting raided.Everybody starts trying to get extorted. People start legitimate, likeliterally coming in and stealing people's equipment. And so that happened to alot of my friends.

Eventually it happened to us. And that is when my familydecides to finally leave the country for good. Of course, all of those machinesand all of those operations were legal. Every single person that had issuesback then had those charges dropped, including us. There was no wrongdoing.With time, obviously four years later, it was found that there was no, nothingillegal about what we did.

but it was an attempt at extorting people. And there's a biggerbackground to that. Which is that the Venezuelan government needs to givehandouts to its cronies. And every year it did this in a different way. Andwhen it came the Christmas of 2017 came, there was no other company or industryin the country that had imported a significant amount of assets that you couldgo raid.

But when they were looking at the import records, they saw thisthing called Bitmain. And they, they saw a lot of people brought things byBitmain. And then when they connected the dots They're like, we got to go findthese things.

Stephen: That makes alot of sense. And I think this is funny because this is what led you kind of,it feels like the ethos behind where you are now in co founding Ledn.

Where now you're using crypto to help people instead of whatyou've seen probably the majority of your early days in crypto. Which is whereit's been used to save people and where, you know, the government interventionwas a lot more and a lot harsher.

Stephen: You come toCanada. Tell us a little bit about Ledn.

Ledn, what kind of drove you to build this product and theseservices for canadians?

Mauricio: Yes. So thefirst one I will say is early on, I knew that I didn't, I wanted to spend aslong as I could, if possible, the rest of my life in Bitcoin to have thebiggest impact. In Bitcoin or in any business, that wasn't going to happen outof Venezuela just because it was going to be very difficult to get funding.

It was very difficult to get anybody to believe that we coulddo something with so much against us. You know, you have the entire systemagainst you. It's a very difficult place to build a business, especially aworld class business. And so we, I knew it couldn't be in Venezuela. So thefirst thing was leaving Venezuela again and, and deciding to do it.

Not where I could, not where my family was, not where power wasfree, you know, not that wasn't going to be my solution. I needed to figure outsomething else to contribute. And it had to be more than connecting a machineinto a wall because I didn't make the machine and the person selling me thepower wasn't me either.

So I wasn't, I was basically bound to get squeezed eventually,but it was what he knew what to do. So. I wanted to keep mining. So I set up myrigs in Canada. I set up a small mining facility in Canada. And I convincedAdam, my business partner today and best friend from university. he had beenfinancing renewable energy for 10 years.

And when I came to Canada, I said, I need cheap power. And hesays, what do you need cheap power for? And so I said, I'm mining Bitcoin. He'slike, tell me more. And so we start talking about mining Bitcoin. And then atthe beginning, early days, we were trying to figure out a way of.Institutionalizing mining in Canada.

And so we were talking to the really big Hydro Québec and bigreal estate owners. And we were very close. Through that process, a couple ofthings happened. Interestingly, we were helping a lot of miners nobody wantedto sell their Bitcoin, everybody wanted to grow their mine, including us.

And so in that process, we said we don't wanna sell the Bitcointo grow the mine. We should be able to get a loan backed by the Bitcoin so thatwe can buy more equipment and keep the upside. Brilliant,

Stephen: Brilliant.

Mauricio: It's ano-brainer. Everybody should be willing to lend us money on this, on thispremise. The first guy we, the first group we went to, Bitcoin's not an asset.

What are you talking about? Bitcoin's not an asset. Who's gonnado that? Second guy? Why would anyone do that? Third guy. It's not an asset,you know? Fourth group, not an asset. And at that point we looked at eachother. You know, he had been financing renewable energy for 10 years. I hadbeen dealing in Bitcoin at the time for now three to four years.

And so we looked at each other and we said, no, like these guysare so short sighted. If we solve this problem, we're going to do great. Likeif we can actually figure this out. And why did we need to do that? Well, weput our heads together. So why do you need to run a lending operation? Well,you need to keep the Bitcoin safe.

We need a custodian. Great. Well, what else do you need? Well,you need to be able to trade out of the Bitcoin if the Bitcoin price goes downand we don't get more collateral. Okay. So we need to connect to an exchange.And so then, so, oh, we need to build a tech platform so that people can giveus their instructions.

And so then we put the pillars together, raise a little bit ofmoney. And in Ledn was created in August, 2018.

Mauricio: And inDecember 2018, we issued Canada's first Bitcoin back loan. And that to me isone of the things that fills me the most with pride to say that we were thefirst people to do something so meaningful for this country.

And to me, it was a big moment and that was a very simplepremise. We believe, very basic thought, if Bitcoin is to become a reserveasset. You're going to need to borrow against it. There is no other reserveasset that you do not borrow against. You borrow against a phone to buy it andtell us, why couldn't you borrow against a Bitcoin?

And so it just made absolute sense for us. And you know, thegeneral thesis of Ledn is we are transparent, we are simple, and we solve atangible problem that you have today. It's not some abstract use case in someblockchain in the cloud, where you're going to hop to four abstract things. yougot a bill.

You need to pay it or you find an opportunity to invest. Youlook at your portfolio, you have your Bitcoin, but you don't want to sell it,but you don't want to miss this opportunity.

Stephen: And it seemslike there's a huge market share for that. I think, I don't know what the statsare exactly, but I think, you know, over the last bear market, 70 percent ofpeople have not sold or moved their Bitcoin around.

And it's probably because of services like yours. It's like, Iwant to keep the upside of it, I believe in it, but I also need money tofinance other operations, other businesses, my day to day life.

Stephen: But as acompliance professional with my background, what were the regulatory, what arestill the regulatory challenges?

What were the hurdles, especially in Canada securing bankingrelationships and partners? Give us, you know, maybe a wide scope of theoverview of how challenging it was to be the first. To issue these crypto backedloans.

Mauricio: Yeah. Sothere was a lot of legal work, a lot of lawyers, a lot of consultations. Thefirst thing was obviously making sure that the product was compliant and thatwe were able to offer it with no issues. So that took a bit of work anddiscovery. I call it with the, with our legal team to basically put draft andput together an agreement that had the right thresholds that we also had tomodel.

You know, what those thresholds would be, you know, at whatpoint would we ask people to come with more collaterals so we'd have to talk toa bunch of clients and say, you know, what would be a great experience for you?You know, and so there was, there was the iteration around the productstructure.

Then there was the iteration around. Okay. Can we legally offerthe product? Great. Then you have to say, okay, how do I comply with the seriesof regulators that may be overlooked overseeing this? So then you go into,okay, well, I need to comply with FinTrack. So you set up an account withFinTrack, the equivalent of FinCEN.

And FinTrack has, you need to have an AML program to follow.And so, you know, you need to, you need to hire an AML consultant to do the MLprogram. So the, the, the basic steps are. Do you have the the legalinfrastructure to offer this, right? Do you have the capital to lend once youget a demand for a loan?

Cause that's when, then we have to go out and raise the moneyto, to lend. Right? Then of course, do you have the right team? Because as thisthing grows, you're going to need to have operations, client success. You needto, you may need to have a marketing team. You can think about the, themarketing can come after, but the sort of basic operations that you're going toneed, you have to tick those boxes.

Mauricio: you know, Iremember the first interactions that you have with, say, you know, an investoror a regulator, and you're telling them what you want and what you want to door your plan, and at the beginning You know, people were, because it was less,less known you know, on the investor side, it would require a lot moreexplanation because there was a lot more unknowns on that front.

On the FinTrack side of the house and all those other things,they didn't really, crypto wasn't really in anybody's radar. So they, it was,it was actually easier, I would say, to, to do certain things. It was now, no,fast forward now. There's a lot less explanation that you have to do toinvestors.

Everybody gets it now. It's sort of like they understand it.And regulators do too. So now there's more scrutiny around anything from aregulatory side, but there's less effort around investors, if that makes sense.

Stephen: Now talk tome about the banking partners, because I think if you live in Canada, NorthAmerica, we all know the banks are really the de facto regulator, because theregulators can put in the requirements, thresholds, but the banks can makethose thresholds and requirements a lot higher because they're the onesabsorbing the risk and offering you the bank account, which is much needed inNorth America.

How were they then maybe compared to now, or was there anythingthat was like a sticking point where they just couldn't get past, that theyreally struggled with understanding when it came to crypto backed assets?

Mauricio: No, Ithink, you know, what I can say is it's been disappointing to say the least tosee the actions of Canadian banks towards this industry.

I would say that the crypto industry is here despite not havingsupport of local banking, not because of support from local banking. I think ithas. Severely hindered Canada's ability to innovate and to fosterentrepreneurship in this industry, and it will continue to do so. it's, it'sone of those things that we as Canadians should be embarrassed about, frankly.

So I, I don't have a lot of good things to say to be honestwith you about the, the support that the Canadian banks have given thisindustry. I would say that. For a while, the U S filled those shoes. But thatwas up until that side of the house also became incredibly constrained. And so,with all that said, I still think the U S is a lot more welcoming in terms ofbanking to crypto businesses than Canada.

And I think if Canada doesn't fix that soon. It will be at amaterial disadvantage to the rest of the world when, as it relates to crypto.

Stephen: And we seein the U. S. they just have a lot more options. Europe has like, you know, kindof like bank adjacent services that you can offer and not call yourself anactual bank.

Whereas Canada, if you're not getting in with one of the bigtiered banks there's very little options for you to do a significant amount ofbusiness. And I think that goes across the board, not just crypto. You know,MSBs will tell you the same thing. Cannabis companies will tell you the exactsame thing.

Self employed people will tell you the exact same thing of howhard it is to keep a banking relationship as a business owner and much lesssomeone using those business services. You know, you know, two years ago tryingto buy an NFT and transferring funds using my Scotia credit card they weren'ttoo lenient, let's just say, on how quickly they'll freeze up those creditcards until you provide them an explanation of buying 500 worth of NFTs.

So definitely a challenging market definitely some hindrances.And I think you're right.

Stephen: I think, youknow, people are banging down the doors of open banking and open bankingprotocols in, in Canada. We need to get there soon. Otherwise, a lot of thesebusinesses won't be here very long.

Stephen: And to thatpoint, maybe talk about Ledn's exposure now and moving their headquarters.

To Grand Cayman or Cayman Islands and your exposure around theworld where you still have services here in Canada. Maybe you can talk a littlebit about that.

Mauricio: Yes, happyto. So, obviously, with everything that's happened in 2022 and mostly 2022,2023 has been a year of rebuilding. But with everything that happened in 2022,transparency, accountability, and regulation.

are top of mind for clients and they should be also forbusinesses and it has been for Ledn. So at Ledn, we have always taken a lot ofpride in our regulatory posture and our transparency and accountability and atestament to that was the fact that Earlier this year, we got, we receivedapproval from SEMA, the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, to register as avirtual asset service provider.

And this is, I believe the first license that the SEMA has evergranted to a lender. And it is something that we are incredibly proud of. Andbecause we received this This license, this regulatory framework that alsoallows us to operate and service our global clients. We basically moved Ledn'sglobal headquarters from Canada to the Cayman Islands.

And so right now, when you interact with Ledn, you'reinteracting with our new entity, Ledn Cayman Sisa, which is a regulated entityunder SEMA. this is something that we have been working on for 18 monthsleading up to the decision. It is it's, it's been excellent working with SEMA.

They have been incredibly diligent, and I am very excited aboutYou know, the, the future of regulation around this this industry. And I thinkthat, you know, not surprisingly, it has been the countries that are hungry forthis industry that have moved faster than others to attract this type ofbusiness because they see.

This is something that has an immense amount of potential andthey, you know, a lot of jurisdictions are looking to become or want to becomethe New York of crypto, if you would. And so, you know, you, you, when, whenLedn made its announcement. That we received our Cayman Vast. It was funnybecause during that same week, Gemini announced its entity in Singapore andCoinbase announced its entity in BVI, or I think I might've gotten those twoswitched over.

But basically, for most companies at scale, it, it makes a lotof sense to set up a, a headquarter where there is a clear regulatory frameworkand where you are welcome and, and, you know, Almost incentivize to operateglobally out of there.

Stephen: And it makessense because those countries are focused.

A lot of their income comes from servicing global institutions,global organizations, and global banks. So they have to be a little bit morewelcoming. Whereas Canada is like, well, we're focused on Canadians. We don'thave to worry about opening up our arms or opening up. You know, our regulatorysystem to other parts of the world where those countries are definitely focusedabout global servicing, globally, customers.

Stephen: And, youknow, I think a big part, and you mentioned globally, a big part of, I believethe ethos when it comes to Ledn is financial inclusion. I'd actually just gotoff a recording with Brett King a futurist, you know, big in the fintech world.And we talked about, you know, are we reducing the numbers in financialinclusion?

He was saying up to 20 percent of Americans are stillunderbanked or unbanked. When you think about places like Africa and around theworld, that number probably rises even with technology and things like M Pesa.What are your thoughts? What do we need? And what his point was is that itdoesn't matter the access to these technologies and the platforms KYC are stillgoing to, you know, a digital identities or identification is always going tobe a hurdle for a lot of these people.

And that's why the number is not being reduced. What are yourthoughts about financial inclusion and what lending can do in other countriescan do to help low and maybe some of the burden on users and customers?

Mauricio: I mean, Ihave a bit of a different view in that I do believe that the work that Bitcoinis doing, and frankly, a lot of the work that Ledn does, is financial inclusionin action today.

I'll give you a couple of examples. We have many clients atLedn that have written to us saying that we are the first loan they've everbeen approved for. So these are clients in places, in remote places of LatinAmerica. We can get a loan. In a remote part of a country like Columbia, fundedin less than 24 hours.

Sometimes people in these towns don't even have a local bankbranch to go to. A lot of times these banks, these local banks don't even haveonline internet, like online banking infrastructure, and it may be, they do.But if you are Latino, like I am, and your family has lost all of their savingsonce or twice before, because some bank went under or, or, or the governmentcalled your bank and said free withdrawals are frozen, which happens often.

iT's like the world cup. I say it's like the world cup. Ithappens every four years in Venezuela. we don't trust local banks. It doesn'tmatter what you tell me. Even if you're across the street from my house, I donot trust you to hold my dollars. And I will certainly not trust you to hold myBitcoin.

there could be, there can be technology, there can beinfrastructure, but there is no trust. now that's, that's the sort of level oneof banking. So when people talk about banking the unbanked, just because youhave a bank account in Venezuela, you're not connected to the world. you'reconnected to some intranetwork that is useless because nobody can send in andout of things in and out of.

So there's this tendency to say that a bank account is thisubiquitous thing that, Oh, everybody has a bank. You're banked now. it's notbanked. A person with a a government bank account a government bank, bankaccount in Venezuela is not banked. They're not banked in the way a person witha JP Morgan account is.

That's not the same. first of all, I would, I would challengethis definition of banked, like what is banked? In today's day and age, I thinkbanked is having a self custodial wallet, like, and access to a service likeand yes, that's going to require KYC to interact with Ledn. But there arealternatives where you can go with no KYC, but that requires a lot moretechnical knowledge, et cetera.

Right? So yes, I think we're making a dent in banking tounbanked, a massive dent on banking to unbanked, right? There's, there's,there's several challenges with banking to unbanked.

Mauricio: And I thinkone is. Education. Okay. Like the number one will be education because eventhough we're going to be here telling you, come bank or no, let, and we'll helpyou get a loan.

Let it, we'll help you earn interest. Ledn, we'll help you keepyour assets safe. We'll be doing that, but don't forget there's a massivepropaganda machine locally from the government banging the opposite drum.Right? And so it's a battle and it's a battle that is, you know, thebattleground for it is education, right?

And the battleground for it is people's testing and people'sexperience. 'cause once people in Venezuela found Bitcoin and they, and theytransacted in it and they used it. They wouldn't listen to anybody that tellsyou it's bad. Like you just like, it's like me when somebody says, Mao,Bitcoin's dead. I'm like, ha ha ha.

Like an actual laugh comes out, emanates from my body. Right.Because it's like, you're so ridiculous.

Stephen: And I thinkyou make a great point about the bank. Yeah. I think people in Nigeria wouldagree with you. Having a bank account doesn't mean much if they can't getaccess. US Dollars or pay merchants around the world, or it takes three monthsto get money.

And even then you don't know if it's guaranteed that you canget a certain amount. So I think you raise a great point is even if we're notreducing the numbers, being banked isn't exactly you know, that kind of levelthat we're trying to reach. And you're talking about Columbia, you're talkingabout markets.

Where Chainalysis has reported these are emerging grassrootsadoption markets for Bitcoin and for probably all the reasons that you'vecovered. Maybe just talk a little bit about the products and services. If I'mjust finding out about Ledn, I'm Canadian so we love Ledn, I think, in Canada.But if we're just saying like, hey, we don't really have Bitcoin or we have alittle bit of Bitcoin.

What are some of the services that you offer so people can getan understanding of what range of products and services that you're offering,you know, crypto newbies and existing crypto holders?

Mauricio: Definitely.So at Ledn, it's in our name, our specialty is lending. And so the, ourflagship product is dollar loans.

With Bitcoin as collateral. So this is a product that you canuse to get dollars or stable coins sent to you within 24 hours, if you needdollars and don't want to sell your Bitcoin. So why do people use theseservices? Many times it's to divest into a different asset. So they have astack of Bitcoin, but they found their dream house.

So they borrow against their Bitcoin to make their downpayment. Or they you know, they saved enough Bitcoin and they want to starttheir own business. They borrow against their Bitcoin to fund that business.Those are the main ones. A lot of people borrow against their Bitcoin to buymore Bitcoin.

And we have a product for that called B2X. It's our mostpopular product. So you, we have two types of loans, which are our standardloans, which means you can use them to get the cash use for whatever you want.But then we have a loan that, you know, you can bring Bitcoin to let in. Andthen with a few clicks, we double that Bitcoin for you with a loan on thebackend, right?

So that product is called B2X. So those are the two kind ofcore lending products to borrow against. And then we are also going to besupporting Ethereum backed loans earlier in 2024. That was, that's the core ofthe lending product. Then there's also the ability for you to earn interest. Soyou can deposit either Bitcoin.

Or stable coins that Ledn U-S-C-C-U-S-C-T or even Ethereum toearn interest on that Bitcoin or on those dollars. And that is called ourgrowth accounts. So for our growth accounts, to give you an example, we'repaying 8.5% on US dollar stable coins. So you can come and earn eight pointhalf percent on U US dollar stable coins at lead, how we're able to pay that8.5%.

It's because the loans that we are issuing to the people thatdon't want to sell that Bitcoin, they are borrowing those dollars, they arepaying 12. 4%. So it's, that's what allows us to take a spread and pay out theeight and a half. And that's something that I will say is that not all lendingplatforms operate in the same manner or have the same risk management policiesor transparency policies than we do as 2022 showed us.

One of the things that Ledn is incredibly proud of and is oneof our differentiators is our proof of reserves. So every six months we have anaccountant that comes in to let and certify public accountant. They get abasically a report of all the balances that we owe to our clients. And theyalso get to see the balances we have in custody, exchanges, lending agreementset cetera. And they make sure that we have enough assets to cover ourliabilities.

Stephen: And I thinkthat transparency is important, showing people kind of breaking it down becausepeople saw high yields. People saw high returns, whether it was you know,algorithmic stable coins, whether it was, you know, FTX, which were, you know,3AC, we're trying to move ahead of, I think, transparency and, you know, theknowledge of what is happening with the Bitcoin, what you're doing.

That, you know, B2X product sounds like a winner. BoringBitcoin to buy more Bitcoin just seems like something HODLers would do. Andduring a market like we've had in the last 18 months, it seems like it wouldprobably be flying off the shelves.

Stephen: What areyour thoughts, and I know we only have a couple minutes left, but what are yourthoughts about the future of crypto?

More importantly, like real world assets, you're in, you know,kind of a digital asset class right now. What are your thoughts about realworld asset tokenization, putting things like bonds and real estate? Is thisgoing to be something that you offer in the future? Is this something thatyou're, that you're seeing your customers are demanding?

What are your thoughts on kind of this? Real world assettokenization that's happening and that's gotten the industry extremely excitedabout over the last 12

months.

Mauricio: Love thattopic. Before I touch on that, I forgot to mention one last product, which isour dual cryptocurrency nodes, which is a product that effectively lets youearn interest also on your Bitcoin on USDC.

But this is done not by lending, but by you. Deciding topotentially sell your Bitcoin at a predefined price on a predefined day. andsimilar to buy Bitcoin. So this product lets you sell Bitcoin at a higher pricethat it is that it is today, or potentially buy Bitcoin at a lower price thanit is today. And you get interest depending on the outcomes.

You can read more. It's a bit of a complex product to explainin a, in a, in a sound bite, but you can check it out every like it's, it's,people love it. So, and I do too. But to your point about real world assets. Ido think that this is going to be a big thing in the coming years. An exampleof this at Ledn is this idea of our, well, our Bitcoin mortgage product.

So this is a product, we already have a product that takes adigital asset and a physical asset and combines them as collateral. It's calledthe Bitcoin mortgage. So we actually pioneered this. We, we announced theworld's first Bitcoin mortgage back in December, 2021. And that product's livein Ontario.

You know, we've issued mortgage, which is a pretty excitingthing to say. But I think this is the beginning of a trend. So, I foreseelending against a blend of Bitcoin and real estate as a very big opportunity.Something that we're already working on. This may also expand to say, you know,borrowing against a tokenized bond or borrowing against tokenized gold.

These types of, Systems, I think you're going to have to stillfigure out a few things on the custody side of the house and the operationalside of the house and also the regulatory side of the house, because and theother thing I will say is that this, this real world asset phenomenon can onlybe driven by centralized providers.

Why? Because no real decentralized product protocol can go to aregistry. To confirm ownership of something. It just doesn't work that way ifyou're truly decentralized, right? And so I believe that it is going to be thecentralized offerers that are going to take the baton here and have to buildthis out to what it can be.

Stephen: I love that.And I think it makes sense.

Stephen: And I think,you know, what are your thoughts about NFTs? Could people then get loansagainst their NFTs or is that market maybe a little too unstable to providethat kind of assurance for customers?

Mauricio: I think,you know, will that come eventually, you know, I still think right now theliquidity is still, know, people are still trying to sort out the liquidity.

You saw some of those projects come out last cycle. I don'tthink they're around right now because, because of the same reasons. And soit's always exciting as a founder to look at the upside. At Ledn, we've alwayslooked down first and then up, right? And so first it's like, how do weabsolutely make sure we can protect people's capital and how do we make surethat there is, you know, that we've managed through every edge case and that wehave the liquidity.

We have been through the darkest hours in Bitcoin and we'vebeen able to sell whatever we need to sell. And it's gone through liquid andit's, it's been, it's been tested and it's as bad a test as it can be. NFTsfailed their first test last cycle. And so will they pass the next one?Probably. And eventually

they will.

Stephen: A camel witha top hat smoking a cigar. It seemed like a great investment to a lot ofpeople. Right.

Stephen: Before we, Iknow we have two minutes left. Talk to me, I know you've been following, I'vebeen following you on Twitter or X and you've been watching closely, and Iguess for all the reasons you talked about in this episode, the Argentinianelection, they just announced a president, I believe it's called there, inArgentina, that is pro Bitcoin, pro getting rid of the central banks, If youhad to wrap up your thoughts in two minutes, why is this important for Southand Central America and around the world?

Mauricio: Very goodpoint and something that is going to be very hard for me to say in two minutesbecause I have too much to say. But Javier Millet was elected president onSunday. Javier Millet is a pro Bitcoin candidate. He is not pro Bitcoin in theway many people think he is. He's not going to come out and make Bitcoin legaltender like Bukele did.

That is actually not his plan. His plan is to eliminate thepeso, shut down the Argentinian central bank and eliminate legal tender lawsaltogether. Meaning. That you and me are going to be able to transact and setup a contract in any asset we want. And the quote from their congresswoman mostrecently said, if anybody wants to make a legal agreement in Bitcoin, theyshould be able to do so, and they will be able to do so.

So you're going to be able to legally transact in Bitcoin. Andanything else for that matter, stable coins, like anything, everything will belegal tender. From stable coins to Bitcoin to dollars to euros, you'll be ableto choose what you want to use.

Stephen: What areyour thoughts? Is this going to happen or is this, you know, folklore? Is thisgoing to, does this help them win the race? But dies out in four years when hehas to actually implement it?

Mauricio: No, I thinkhe's, I think he implements it. It's been done before. It's been done byEcuador. It's been done by El Salvador. Both with good examples. Both curbeddown inflation from the hundreds to the low twos within years of doing this.

I've written amply about this. You can check out our blog. AndI've, I've gone, I've broken down both examples and what happened in each case.I do think that he's going to go through with it. I do think that is going tobe great for Argentina. And I think that this is gonna be a lot more relevantthan El Salvador for many reasons.

Not a small one, being that Argentina is the 24th largesteconomy in the world. It's, it's a member of the G 20, it is the FIFA World CupSoccer Champion. And their top star is literally rewriting soccer history inthe us. it, it, the, the, the level of influence that they have bothculturally, politically, and economically are gonna make this a much louderbang, I think, that people expect.

Stephen: And I thinkthat's a great place to end off this conversation.

Stephen: And you'reright. You can't just, it's not just about finances, it's still about culturalrelevance, it's still about influence. Mauricio, thank you so much for thisconversation. I can't wait to get you back on the show, you know, maybe postone year and see and catch up and talk about all the things that we'vediscussed and do a little bit of a recap and see where we are.

Definitely. Yeah. I'm actually working on my 2024 predictions,so we can go through this sometime next year.

We'll talk soon.

Mauricio: Cheers.

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