Argentina's stock market just had its worst case of the Mondays in recent memory.

The S&P Merval index took a 5% nosedive and, even after a slight recovery, is still down 3%.

This time, crypto, or more accurately, shady actors abusing the tech, are to blame.

How We Got Here, In Valentine’s Day Puns 

So... remember when President Milei thought it would be cool to shill a random Solana token called LIBRA?

That Valentine's Day tweet sent the token to a mind-bending $4.5 billion market cap.

But it turns out this love wouldn’t last, and the entire scandal left crypto Twitter crying like the victim of a recent ugly breakup. 

The token absolutely cratered by 90% in a mere 11 hours, shattering records and hearts in one fell swoop.

Billions of dollars vanished faster than discount chocolate on February 15th.

And now we've got blockchain detectives playing “Baby Come Back” on repeat as they cry over their keyboards, putting the broken pieces together.

Okay, enough love-based puns… and thanks for sticking around for that.

Who Did The Dirty Deed?

The shadowy figure at the center of all this mess is none other than Hayden Mark Davis, the LIBRA "advisor" who's now in the spotlight for his role in the token’s launch.

This dude casually admitted to pulling $100 million from the liquidity pool, all while claiming it's not for personal profit.

That's about as believable as the last rug pull story we heard, but hey, there’s still a very, very small chance he’s telling the truth… but it’s not likely.

Could this be the first time a president gets impeached over a crypto rug pull?

Opposition lawyers are already filing criminal fraud charges against the sitting president, and somewhere in Buenos Aires, Milei's PR team is probably having the worst week of their lives.

Seriously, what was the guy thinking?

Market Mayhem Ensues

The traditional finance bros are finally paying attention to crypto – but not in the way anyone wanted this week.

Argentina's entire financial market took a massive blow from this scandal, and that’s not exactly good press for Web3 as a whole.

The ripple effects are hitting everything from bonds to the peso, and nobody's sure where the bottom is.

When a president's crypto endorsement can tank an entire country's stock market, we're in uncharted territory.

The growing intersection of crypto and traditional finance has its ups and downs, but we’re not sure many people had “sitting president rug pulls and tanks his national economy” on their Q1 2025 bingo card. 

The lines between digital and traditional assets are blurred and not always in a good way.

Business As Usual For Argentina?

Argentina just learned the hard way that crypto and politics mix about as well as leveraged trading and sleep schedules.

The LIBRA disaster is just another crypto scandal in the annals of Argentinian history – a history which, unfortunately, remains fraught with them. 

At least this latest debacle proves that even in crypto, presidents aren't too big to fail.