The post Why Argentinian Crypto Folks Can’t Get Enough of Him appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

It has been almost exactly a year since Javier Milei became the 59th President of Argentina. Inaugurated on December 10, 2023, the flamboyant libertarian economist — a former goalkeeper who cloned his dogs and called central banks “the worst garbage that exists on this Earth” — had vowed to end the South American nation’s hyperinflation crisis and to drastically reduce government spending. Since then, Argentina’s monthly inflation rate has fallen from 25.5% in December 2023 to 2.7% last October. The government has registered a fiscal surplus for nine months in a row, a substantial achievement considering it’s been running deficits since 2008. The Argentinian peso isn’t in freefall against the U.S. dollar anymore. And while the country’s economy is projected to have shrunk by 4% in 2024, a 6% rebound is expected in 2025. For at least some, the biggest surprise so far is that Milei actually followed through on most of his campaign promises, according to Alfonso Campenni, Latin American growth lead at Matter Labs, the main developer behind the Ethereum layer-2 protocol ZKsync. “For Argentinians, it’s super hard to understand the concept of a politician doing his job,” Campenni, a native of Buenos Aires, told CoinDesk in an interview. “At this time of the year, people are usually mad because they can’t buy things for Christmas [because of hyperinflation]. But now it’s like: ‘Okay, maybe this is something new.’ It’s peaceful, it’s super weird.” “I was at a tech event where Milei was invited. He got a standing ovation when he arrived on stage,” Jack Saracco, another Buenos Aires native and the co-founder of crypto payment platform Ping, told CoinDesk. “Most Argentinian crypto people love what he’s doing. There’s a meme going around: ‘When are we going to be able to vote for him again? Because I would…

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Filed under: News - @ December 4, 2024 3:23 pm