Unchained - How the Libra Scandal Exposed Memecoin Insider Trading on the World Stage - Ep. 785

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Was Argentina’s president used to pump a memecoin? The launch of $LIBRA has turned into a political and financial scandal, with accusations of insider trading, bribes, price manipulation, and government ties to crypto influencers. In this episode, Diogenes Casares, a crypto trader with deep connections in both memecoins and Argentina’s crypto scene, exposes what really happened behind the scenes. He details how a network of market makers, influencers, and political insiders orchestrated the launch, how the price was manipulated from the start, and why he believes the entire operation was illegal. Casares also explains the potential legal consequences for those involved, the impact on President Javier Milei’s administration, and what all this means for the future of Solana memecoins. Show highlights: 3:06 How Dio heard about the launch of an Argentina-related memecoin two weeks in advance 8:09 Whether Argentines were the ones who actually lost money on the coin 40:50 How Kelsier Ventures’ Hayden Davis crashed the price of the token 14:51 How the story is being perceived in Argentina 16:38 Why Dio believes Argentine President Javier Milei was naive 22:38 Who the insiders were and what role they played 26:56 Why Dio says that insider trading is illegal even in crypto 30:31 How some of the insiders are “pathological liars,” according to Dio 34:57 Why Dio doesn’t believe Jupiter’s statement and is skeptical about the Meteora founder’s statement 40:50 Why Dio says Davis’ “strategy” was actually price manipulation 44:32 What should be done with the $100 million that Davis holds 45:24 How Milei could suffer politically because of the situation 51:48 What Dio thinks about Dave Portnoy’s refund 57:09 How it was disappointing that this scandal happened in a place with so much crypto adoption 1:00:53 What’s next for Milei and whether he’ll go through impeachment Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com Thank you to our sponsors! RockWallet Mantle Bitwise Guest: Diogenes Casares, a crypto trader from Argentina Links Unchained: Crypto Community Incensed by Insider Activity on LIBRA Memecoin Promoted by Argentina’s President Coffeezilla interview: Argentina’s memecoin creator interview (LIBRA) Bribes, Insiders and a Manipulated President | What Really Happened with $LIBRA by Diogenes Casares Jupiter Exchange’s statement Meteora’s Ben Chow’s statement Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What I think is a little bit hard for these guys to say is that there was a bunch of people that were seating the LP and they were probably trying to figure out how they wanted to manage the price curve. I find it very hard to believe that they weren't as a result relatively intimately aware of how this token was going to work or how the price curve was going to work and that they didn't take advantage of it at all. Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. We are now featuring quotes from listeners on the show. On X, Heavenly Pulse responded to my interview on crypto sentiments with Arco's chief investment officer, Jeff Dorman. Heavenly Pulse wrote, quote, fundamentalists are greater than sentiment always. Market psychology creates opportunities for builders who focus on real value. Wall Street gets it. They're looking at adoption metrics while CT doom scrolls. To have your comment featured, write a review of the podcast overall, or leave a comment on our video on YouTube or X. This is the February 18th, 2025 episode of Unchained. Crypto moves fast. It's why Bitwise launched the weekly CIO memo, a jargon-free summary of what's moving crypto markets, written by one of the best in the business, CIO Matt Hogan. Get up to speed in five minutes or less. Check it out at bitwiseinvestments.com slash CIO memo. Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing.

Mantle is building the largest sustainable hub for on-chain finance, launching three new products. Enhanced index fund for optimized crypto exposure, Mantle banking for seamless daily financial experience, and Mantle-X for AI-powered innovation. Learn more at group.mantle.xy. I'd like to introduce you to Rockwallet. This is a digital wallet that puts your crypto under your control. Using Rockwallet is quick, easy, and secure. Visit rockwallet.com slash welcome slash unchained

for an exclusive welcome offer for unchained listeners. Today's guest is Dio Casaris, a crypto trader from Argentina. Welcome, Dio. Hey, thanks for having me. We are recording the weekend after the Argentine president, Javier Malay, promoted a meme coin that he then unposted after numerous insiders jumped in in size on block one. Apparently, this was reported by Connor Grogan of coin base. And then it looks like about $100 million was extracted. So kind of a classic example

of what looks to have been a pump and dump. This has created a massive uproar in the cryptic community as well as in Argentina itself. Dio, you're both Argentine American, and you happen to actually be in Argentina as all this was unfolding for unrelated reasons. And you wrote a great post on X about your knowledge of the backstory that led up to this launch. So can you tell us what you know of how it got started? Yeah. So I basically started getting messages from people that I trade with about two, three weeks ago, asking if there was a chance that Argentine government was going to launch a token. For that color, they were just kind of like friends of mine. So I didn't think it was that serious. I asked some low-law.

level people. They said there was no way. And then I got a more serious message from someone I respect a lot and who tends to be right, who claimed that an official in the government had actually been functionally paid off, whether that's like a bribe or like consulting fee, whatever. And that the official, they told me was very high in the government. They told me who it was, but I'm not going to say it because I don't, I can't confirm that. And that made me very concerned to the point where I reached out to a bunch of people in the industry in Argentina specifically and also actually to politicians. I messaged one of the more known ones is Demi and Rydell, who told me that he didn't know about any kind of token that was going to be launched, that there would be no official government

token and like basically told me it would be all right. So I kind of calmed down. And then it was very much not all right. So that's why I wanted to kind of, the main reason I wanted to write that article was to kind of show that there was a lot in the immediate moments after it launched. The story was kind of Malay launched a token when in reality there's this kind of nebulous group behind the token that really kind of functionally took advantage of him and his position. Yeah. Something that was interesting about what you wrote is the point. point person for all things crypto related in the Malay administration, you said actually was not

aware. So what does it say to you that that person didn't seem to know and yet this happened? To me, I think there's a couple different things. One, I think Malay has admitted very publicly that he does not know anything about. He said in Spanish he's ignorant about all things crypto. So he kind of outsources that a bit to his team. Like just now, right before we started recording this, he retweeted something because now there's going to be probably a trial for him in Argentina. He retreated a tweet that talked about how hard it would have been for an average Argentine who didn't have a crypto wallet to buy the token.

Not realizing that by doing that, because there's also a language barrier here, a bunch of people on crypto Twitter just see Argentine president retweeting something. something that says Libra, the token goes back up. So I think it's a mix of like ignorance on that side. And I think it's also because there was another high up official that kind of was the one to push this. I don't think Malay one day woke up and was like, I'm going to promote this token or I think I should do this. I think it was someone very close in his cabinet. But it was not a lot of the people that might have had more direct or regular access to people in the industry.

So from what you've pieced together, or at least what you wrote, it seems like this was more something that was generated within the meme coin community. And in order to make sure that the launch was successful, at least from the perspective of certain parties, that, you know, basically the insiders, that their notion was that once he tweeted it that would be what would create the launch and would make it probably, I guess, profitable for them too. Yeah, I actually got a message today from someone at a large VC firm who showed me a message they actually had with Hayden, right, who's kind of the guy at Kelsey A Ventures, which is functionally is kind of the central piece and getting all of the influencers and people together and then also

trying to influence the Argentine government. And Hayden, this was in December, and Hayden was basically saying that he could get, I'm not going to say it because it had expletives in it, but that he could get a lay to post whatever he wanted if by going through this functionary in the government and basically paying money, which is, yeah, that's kind of the main issue there, I think, is that basically it was you know no one in argentina was really involved besides this one person in the cabinet potentially and maybe one or two other people and then also like the people that were negatively impacted were primarily non-Argentines as well like if you look on chain it was mostly people

affected also by milani or trump so there's a lot of like yeah it's a very confusing story because there's a lot of moving parts and a lot of really weird characters. Yeah, well, so tell me more about that. Like, you know, why is it that you think that there aren't many like everyday people in Argentina that were impacted and why it appears to be more people who are generally into crypto? And then, yeah, let's start there. I just think it's a capital thing.

Argentines don't have a lot of capital. And what capital Argentines tend to have is very, very, very, very consistent. conservative if they have it outside of the country. So it's not really like the same story as in the US where you have this big meme coin trading kind of community and like bigger whales that also participate. That kind of trading culture doesn't really exist at the same level in Argentina. And even if it were to exist, it's a small country in terms of GDP compared to the US or other countries. And so when you looked on chain, or at least in the piece, it looked like more like you were quoting others, but you know, what were you and others piecing together about who it was

that participated? So I was trying to get like an inside track on when this launched. I was working actually with a sniping group that was the second transaction into Trump. So they actually had like pretty good experience. They're pretty good at finding these things. And they basically missed it because the ticker was weird and because of a couple other things. You mean they miss Libra? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which kind of because of how the wallet was funded. But then if you look at all the wallets that immediately sniped, immediately sniped the launch, there was a lot of overlap with Trump and Melania wallets, which again, the guy that I knew about didn't actually know that Trump was going to launch a token. So technically, if his wallet

were to be mentioned, people would assume it's an insider. He wasn't actually an insider. But from what I had heard before, it's roughly the same team that had done Melania. And that has some overlap with Kelsey dash Hayden and then also some of the Meteora guys dash Jupiter dash moonshot. So, and that tends to be kind of. it tends to be more or less backed up by all of the early transactions that you can see there. And then the later transactions, you can just see that they're mostly very big wallets. You're not seeing very small wallets. Yeah.

So by the way, for people who weren't glued to crypto Twitter this weekend, it's Hayden Davis is the name of the guy from Kelsior. So, you know, since you know this world, like about these meme coin launches, like, Talk a little bit about how they typically go. Like, you know, when we're talking about sniping, that's, as far as I understand, getting in very early, like right before the general public usually knows about the coin and taking a large part of the supply so that way you can basically dump once the price goes up. But tell us a little bit about how this works in terms of, because as, you know, we're all figuring out, like, okay, for each of these, there is like a set of insiders.

Yeah, I mean, in general, what the structure appears to be here is that there were kind of multiple different levels. If you're familiar with, there was kind of like, there were different levels of people that were insiders. There were people that were allowed to cede the Meteora pool, which is basically the liquidity pool for cents and cents and cents on the dollar compared to what the actual price. was. Those were a couple larger influencers that had also been involved in Melania. Those were like kind of, I call them like nodes in the sense that they're like a very big character in like this community and then in this community and then this community. So they were kind of prioritized in that way. Then this is kind of gone over Twitter already. But then there were a lot of larger but not the same kind of level influencers that then got cut into the token by just

getting sent the contract address and then buying. That's pretty normal in general for anyone that's launching just a direct meme coin to do it that way. I think where this kind of fell apart was that if anyone read the actual tweet that Malay published. It said very clearly, this is a private company that I think is interesting, which in my opinion was then basically saying like, hey, this is not us. This is not government sanctioned. We're just kind of like promoting it. So as soon as it's started to be promoted as like an official government backed token, that's when basically Malay came in and was like, hey,

this has to stop. But what had happened before that, which is, That's one thing that's different, but it started collapsing two hours before that. And that was functionally, in my opinion, because Hayden was taking a lot of liquidity out of the liquidity pool. That's the $100 million that kind of came out. He was managing the pool and he was functionally taking out hundreds of millions of dollars or providing one-sided LP, which is literally just a sell order. so it exhausted basically all of the buy pressure and left very little liquidity

to actually allow for people to sell. So I think that's functionally what actually went wrong. It also like these kinds of things are not supposed to leak weeks before they get launched. Like very few people that weren't in the know knew about Melania or knew about Trump. Right. So that's also bad execution

for these kinds of things. But I don't think there would have been necessarily an outcome of this that would have been positive either. Like even if they had done it differently with not as many people knowing in advance? Yeah, just with the same cast of characters, I don't think there would have been any outcome that would have been net positive

for like the country's reputation or for traders. Okay, and why do you say that? The Trump token is very different. in a reputational perspective because Trump can do what Trump wants to do. The United States is still the United States. Right now, Argentina is kind of semi-defined by Malay, at least when it comes to like public perception.

So if you tie a token very closely to him, that hurts his reputation, that hurts him being seen as this kind of incorruptible guy, which in general he's been, it actually has a really bad impact on the country. And we saw that today actually, the Argentine stock market is down 5.7-ish percent on Open, which is probably the first time we've seen such an aggressive impact of crypto hurting non-crypto-related stocks.

Because I think there's an important thing to mention here when it comes to how this has been perceived in Argentina. If you look on like Coin Desk, maybe Malay is mentioned a lot on Bloomberg or Wall Street Journal in the U.S. you get one or two mentions. on every single Argentine news site, it is almost every single story right now. Like on La Nation, it's like three out of four of the top stories. On like Clarine, it's like the day it happened, it was seven out of eight of the top stories. Like it's getting an absurd amount of coverage and it's seen almost universally badly by the

Argentine public. It's just kind of now people are arguing about, you know, does this mean that someone has to be fired? Does this mean that the president was actually directly involved? That's kind of like, it's actually very interesting because everyone agrees basically that this was bad. What they disagree about is like who's at fault and what should happen next. So I know you probably, you may not know the answer to this, but but in case you do I have to ask, Do you think that Javier's team or probably not him side? I'm not sure how much he manages, you know, things that go on his Twitter feed. But do you think that he or someone in his orbit that was managing this understood that the tweet itself was, you know, publicizing the contract address and that it was effectively launching the meme coin?

I don't think so. I genuinely, I don't think so. I think that they might have gotten paid to do it. I'm like 99% sure that someone probably did. I don't think they realized that it was basically entirely reliant on that tweet. And I don't think they realized how strongly a tweet like that would tie Malay and the government to that token, if that makes sense. Versus it being like a separate private company. even in the name, like this is, we're not talking about Malay token, right?

Or, you know, Karina token or whatever. We're talking about Libra, which like if you just look at it on its own does not seem affiliated. So I don't think they actually realized. But I think that they should, regardless of that, they should have. And if they didn't, they should basically come forward and explain like their thought process. Because right now, I think there is, he's. going to get interviewed later tonight, which hopefully should clear up a bunch of things.

But it's also like it's the first very serious scandal that the government hasn't been able to really just shake, which is interesting and kind of sad that it has to be crypto-related. Yeah, by the way, Karina is his sister, who she also has a title in the government, which is I think she's chief of staff. Oh, okay. So, or at least actually on Wikipedia, it says she's the general secretary of the presidency, which maybe it's the same thing. And I did see that Alex Kruger, who is one of the hosts of one of our other shows, Bits and Bips, and is also from Argentina, said Malay's sister could take the fall. She's been his right hand for years. So, you know, we'll see how it plays out.

I don't think Malay's sister will likely take the fall on this just because he can't. out very aggressively yesterday. I'm supporting her going out and talking to people on the street and stuff like that, but like very aggressively, like probably like 20 plus retweets. I think that was kind of his signal that like she's not going to take it. I think it's more likely that they get more in detail on what happened with kind of Hayden and these guys. And they explain kind of what happened. But I don't think that it's sustain.

for them to act like there wasn't some, like, you know, this magically got tweeted. You know, there was obviously someone that didn't do their homework. All right. So in a moment, we're going to talk a little bit more about the crypto groups that were involved in this. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Hi, I'm Matt Hogan, CIO of Crypto Asset Manager Bitwise. Look, crypto can be confusing.

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We have another listener comment responding to my interview with Arka's Jeff Dorman. On YouTube, Erwin Dieter writes, quote, well, who forced people to ape into meme coins? I'm feeling the down of the market as well as the rest. But if you lost money gambling meme coins, you fully deserve it. Again, if you want to hear your comment featured on the show, please write a review or leave a comment on an episode on YouTube or X. Back to my conversation with CEO. So you were kind of talking, I mean, we did talk briefly a little bit earlier about all the different groups that are involved. So some of the names we've already mentioned are Kip. There's Kelsior. There's, sorry, I didn't write this down, so I'm just blanking. There's like,

Jupiter. Yeah, L.A. Jupiter, Jupiter, Meteora. There's, there's numerous ones. So can you just talk a little bit about like, you know, and even if you don't know exactly what role each of them played, you know, for this one, like, it seems like you generally know kind of how it works. So just break that down. Yeah. In general, Hayden, Kelseyr kind of guys are kind of power brokers. So they functionally make the meme coin, get whatever, like people to sign off that they need on board. And then they kind of go and get a bunch of influencers and people on board. Large the kind of teams at Meteor, Jupe and to an extent Moonshot now, because Jupe just bought Moonshot. Although I do.

don't think the original team had anything to do with anything. They tend to get forward notice of these kinds of projects because of the fact that like you can almost look at these projects as like the Jupes, the meteors, et cetera, as like intakes for the meme coins. Like the meme coin teams kind of need these projects to be ready to kind of accept them and verify addresses, etc. So that trades can go through. So they tend to have forward warning and they tend to push and promote these kinds of things because they make a lot of money off of fees related to them. Hayden and those guys tend to be much more directly related and kind of like mastermind type. Like the KIP guys basically my understanding is were contacted by Hayden to help manage getting

connected with the Argentine government. And then from there, like almost all of the influencers and everyone that gets brought in, gets brought in via Hayden and then kind of, Hayden then kind of outsources it to those people in turn. So it's very nebulous. It's not like military organization style. It's very almost frat boy organization style. But they all kind of have their own interests in this and they all have their own roles that they play. And the Jupiter Meteora guys have.

come out and said that they didn't know, but I find it very unlikely that they didn't know because they were supposedly also very involved in Melania. And obviously Hayden was very involved there as well. So the overlap is a little good. And what about the LA Cabal, which they kind of fall under the influencers in general. Like they probably didn't know. No one really, not a lot of people knew the actual contract address or ticker. So then they got message. I think there's some videos of this on Twitter. They got messaged right as it launched so they could buy on stream or like publicly and then promote it.

But they kind of have an understanding that there's going to be a coin, if that makes sense. And that's a little bit more mercenary than the people that get let into the LP because if you're getting let into the LP, you basically can't lose money. It is literally mathematically impossible. But if you're buying into the token, you know, no matter how quickly you do it, you now need the token to go up for you to make money. So they kind of all of they have like a role of like, sure, they buy into the token early, but now they are very heavily incentivized to get more people to buy it because that's how they make their money. Okay. Yeah. So you wrote in your piece that you felt like what, you know, the.

numerous parties did that you were calling it insider trading. And you said it's illegal, regardless of whether the asset question is the security or not. People have been convicted of insider training, NFTs, and art. This is illegal, extractive, and incredibly dangerous behavior. So I know you're not a lawyer, but talk a little bit about why you were saying that here. I have sued people in crypto specifically before. And I've won a case in Southern District against the DAO. And I've also been very interested in a lot of the cases. It's very, very, very simple. If you have some kind of information that other people don't have that you know has a material impact on the asset, you touching that asset in any way, including actually selling the asset,

most people think about it as buying, but say you find out that a company is actually doing really bad and you want to get out of it, you actually should not sell it because you have information other people don't. By definition and that whole explanation I just gave, almost everyone directly involved in this project had some kind of information that other people didn't. That was not publicly available at all. The website was launched the same day, right? So it wasn't like, you can be like, oh, well, like the website was like up for like multiple days and people could have found it. It was launched, I think like hours before this got launched, had no SEO presence. And it's illegal. It's not often enforced in crypto, but if you know

something that other people don't know and you're taking advantage of that to make money, you're insider trading. It's just like very, very, very, it's like very black and white. Yeah, tell me a little bit more about the lawsuit that you pursued against the Dow. So I run a trading firm that would do kind of Dow restructuring. We, alongside a bunch of other investors, had a majority voting share in this Dow. And then basically the founder of the Dow was like, well, I actually don't have to do what you say, even though I said in my white paper that token holders have the right to vote and make major decisions. So we took them to court for that on breach of contract. He was a no show in court to be fair, but the judge agreed with the arguments, and we were able to win that case.

We've done similar cases like that in general. It tends to be doubt-related, but in general, when you explain to a judge, you take away, you know, LPs, Jupiter, so on a blockchain, and you explain very high-level what happens. If you went to a judge and you were like, hey, this person knew that a president was going to be a president was going to be able to, you know, going to support penny stock that was reported to be related to the Argentine economy or government and as a result bought into it early or bought into it right as it was launching because it got confirmed by someone they knew was very trustworthy or that was an insider in the company. The judge would have no problem saying that's insider trading. You just change a few of those variables just because it happens with a token doesn't

make it not illegal. It's just that it doesn't tend to get enforced. Yeah. And so by the way, the name of that particular case was Spartacus Dow. So yeah, so now let's talk about the different statements by these different groups. So there was KIP. Interestingly, so Julian of Kip wrote, the funds are still on chain and not a single Sall will be moved. Yes, Kip is involved in the project, but our primary role is to help run the fund allocation to the Argentinian companies, unless on the token side, we are not the market maker. So what did you think of that statement? Well, first of all, it completely ignores the fact that there were tens of millions of

dollars that were transferred from the deployer to private wallets outside of the $100 million that they're talking about. That money, I don't know where it is right now, but that money is probably gone. And that is inside our money that got just taken, right? So that's one thing there. The Kip statement seems to directly contradict with Hayden's statement, who appears to have actual control over the money, where he seems to want to just buy the token back. And very public was very blatant that, you know, the $100 million was not actually raised for small companies, as they said it would be. and as they told Malay to say it would be,

he just wants to kind of, he said put it back into the chart, which is not a great way of phrasing it. So I think that they're all kind of, yeah, no, it's not. You can't really talk about accountability and then say, I want to put it the 100 million back into the chart. Yeah, it's important to realize that a lot of these guys are just pathological liars. And they've been continually outed for lying multiple. times and their stories have continually been changing.

Do you have some other examples that you can cite? Well, like, Hayden initially was like, we have the $100 million, we control it, and we're going to do this. And then like earlier today, Dave Portnoy was like, or whatever his first name is, I don't actually know. Yeah, Dave Portnoy, yeah. Okay. He was like, so who actually owns that money?

And like Hayden had like a breakdown and was like the country of Argentina. So they don't really have coherent. They're just kind of lashing out right now. I think what is clear is that KIP was involved. I think it is clear that the market maker, I really disagree with them calling it market making because it's just providing liquidity, which is different from market making.

But the market maker, i.e., the person who actually has control of the funds, does appear to be Hayden, his family, which is another thing to mention. Hayden isn't necessarily alone in this. him and his dad actually were running like a consultancy company that was getting money from like crypto companies all the way back in like December to try and push stuff with the current administration. So Hayden is like sure he might be the face but his dad is also involved.

Oh interesting. And what were they trying to push with the Trump administration? No, no, no, the Argentin. Oh, the Malay. Oh. Yeah, because I received messages from people that were like, hey, do you know this Hayden guy? He says that you pay him a consulting fee. He manages some things, like very heavily implying bribery and that he can get like official partnerships with the government.

Okay. But is that unrelated to what you wrote about in your Twitter post where you said that Okay, because you mentioned that there was at least some point a discussion around launching a completely different token called Afwera, which they didn't end up doing. That was from a different, that was from a guy who manages one of the larger exchanges here, who had basically like the government here did what they're supposed to do, right? they like bounced the idea off him. They're like, hey, we have this offer, like some of these guys, including, by the way, this guy was very upfront about this, that the Jube CEO was involved in that Fuerta token idea. Meow.

Yeah. Or founder. I don't know if it was CEO or founder, but probably him. And I think it's potentially suspicious that they claim not to be related in the current token after hearing that from the local. Argentine exchange operator. But I mean, like in theory, it could be that way. But I have the gut feeling that they've been trying to do this for a while

and been trying to kind of go around the normal checks and balances that had been stopping them up until, you know, Valentine's Day. Yeah, just to, you know, mention their public statement, the Jupiter Exchange tweeted, quote, a few members of the Jupiter team knew that there would be at some point, a token project associated with Argentinian president, Javier Malay. We learned of this about two weeks ago directly from Calcia Ventures. While we were initially unsure, we then saw credible evidence in the form of public tweets from Malay's personal account that he was serious. That was the full extent of our knowledge. We were completely unaware of the dealings between the principles,

in this case Malay and the market makers, and were not involved. in it in any way, shape, or form. This isn't written by them, right? They said principles. That's a lawyer's talking and writing a statement for them. Yeah, by the way, right after that it says, it was an open secret in meme coin circles that an Argentina coin, they put this in quotes, was going to launch at some point,

as evidenced by the many public tweets that have since surfaced, but in keeping with our ethos of confidentiality, we did not speak about it with anyone at all, online or offline. Further, no one on the team received any Libra tokens or related compensation at any time. Yeah, it's a good public statement. I don't think they were heavily involved, but they knew, in my opinion, they just have such a powerful position in the Solana ecosystem in general that it's very hard for them to not know.

Like they basically admitted to knowing and then not knowing if it was legit until the tweet, which then makes it public, which then makes it not criminal, which is very convenient. I think, yeah, I don't really believe their angle that they had no idea and that none of the team members made money or that they didn't make some kind of money. Well, I guess they didn't say they didn't receive any tokens, but they definitely made money as a result of the token from fees. You mean from fees or, yeah.

And just to get it in there, Ben Chow of Meteora also released his own statement, although I don't think it was on the Meteora Twitter page. It was only on his personal Twitter page, but he said, quote, Meteora and I personally have never received or managed any tokens on the side, do not receive knowledge or get involved with any off-chain dealings, and we keep to the highest levels of confidentiality for any token launch happening on our platform. To maintain the high levels of confidentiality, very few people in Meteora have access to any launch information. Often, the launch time is only known by me, and the token slash pool address is only given to me and an on-call engineer or two a few minutes before an actual launch, if at all.

Then it goes on about how all this is permissionless and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, well, he just proceeded to explain how it was not very permissionless. it's not very permissionless if they're finding out about the launch a few minutes before and they have an engineer on call there's something that there's some reason that they need to be informed so yeah although actually so this is like getting a little bit off topic but when I was thinking about all this this morning I thought oh you know what's going to happen at some point because I would imagine you can code a smart contract that will allow you to launch something without any human knowing what the address is beforehand.

And I understand, like, you would have to, it would have to be able to, like, interact with, like, different websites and tweets and whatever. Like, but I imagine that you could create something that integrates with all these different platforms so that the, you know, publicizing it launches everywhere simultaneously. That's, that's probably going to be a thing someday. That's just my opinion. Yeah. I'm not super technical, so I can't talk on that side that much.

But my understanding, though, is also that because of the nature of the SVM, it's a little bit harder to do it, if that makes sense. Because like some code bases are, you know, public on GitHub, but not actually. Like there's a bunch of kind of middleware that you need to actually use in order to interact with the code, which is different than how the EVM tends to work. So it makes it. And also like, for example, like the token standard is like, it's not like a standard. It's like run by like a private company. Yeah. Well, if not on Solana, then on a different chain. Yeah. Yeah. But like, yeah. I think in theory, like to the extent it's possible, it should be possible in, I think it's already basically possible on Solana. just because of all of the aspects that these teams kind of need.

I'm sorry, you're saying it is already possible on Solana? I thought you just said. Well, I'm saying it's hard to do it without interacting with some kind of software that in theory could find out or something or like without a couple assumptions. But what I think is like a little bit hard for these guys to say is that there was a bunch of people that were seating

the LP and they were probably trying to figure out how they wanted to manage the price curve. I find it very hard to believe that they weren't as a result relatively intimately aware of how this token was going to work or how the price curve was going to work and that they didn't take advantage of it at all or at the very least what something they're not saying is that they didn't financially benefit in some way. They're just saying stuff they didn't do. Yeah, well, it was interesting in that CoffeeZilla interview that Hayden Davis did with CoffeeZilla. So first of all, you know, he's talking about this dilemma of how they have this $100 million. They don't know what to do with it, blah, blah, blah.

And, you know, one of the explanations he gave for how they even got it was that basically when these meme coins launch that Kelsior strategy was to take some of the money off the table to create a treasury. So that way, basically, as the meme coin is going, the price is going up and down, they can basically pump it. Yeah. No, but all, yeah, rebu, but also. Sorry. It's both. It's that at least my interpretation was that he was saying was if we, if we sell a bunch, the price will lower. And then that allows people to buy in at a lower price.

And so anyway, so the point, I don't know. this is maybe I'm... I mean, he's just admitting coffeezilla to price manipulation functionally. Because he said that this was to protect users. That's the word he used. Yeah, I actually, like, I'm familiar with that to an extent. I got into crypto, I don't mention this a lot, but I actually got into it initially

as like someone that would help people launch meme coins at the time on ETH and BSC. And there was actually, that's like a pretty. standard practice to like take out some of the liquidity or to get fees at the time because it was safe moon meta at the time where you know you pay like a tax on every transaction and the team receives a percentage fee and then when you know when momentum changed you would buy or you would sell that that doesn't surprise me that much it is surprising to take out half of all of the cash just to do it. And from what I can see, his point about like, oh, like, you know, now people can buy at a lower price. People, yeah, sure. But then also, there was never a buy from the deployer wallet at any point. Like, in general, when you do something like that, you're selling, sure, but then you're also buying a bit. Which again, that whole process, if you were doing it, was price manipulation inherently, which is illegal. as a reminder.

Yeah, one other thing that was funny about this moment was, I think Kaffizilla got, like, overwhelmed when he was like, because he was seeing so much stuff. And I think Kofi Zill was just like, oh, my God. And so what happened was Kavisela, like, interpreted it as something like he said, like, oh, so you didn't sell. And then he did go. No, we did sell, is that we didn't swap. So then he, he like,

had to correct him and like repeat a few times that actually no they did sell it's just they didn't swap yeah but i mean like i understand what he's basically saying is like they changed how the liquidity pool worked so it was like a limit order basically that was selling in a range probably but like he sold like sure they didn't just send it in one transaction but that's like that's like very tiny detail yeah well okay so obviously now they're they're in a big big pickle. You know, much of the coffee's-in-disclosure discussion was focused on, like, or and, and even when Hayden made that video where it was part of their statement, and I'm sure you saw there were so many funny memes about the video. Oh, my God, just thinking about it makes me laugh so hard. But anyway,

so, like, they have this money and they don't know what to do it. And that's when he was announcing all this stuff about how they're going to put it back in the chart and whatever. But I was just curious, for your opinion, what do you think is the best way for? for them to handle, you know, this now that they have all this money? I think they have, like, realistically two options. They can do a refund, which I think makes the most sense. Or, like, if they actually want to do something with it, they do what they originally said they were going to do,

where, like, the money goes towards a fund that invests in small Argentine businesses. And then basically all of the holders have, ownership or something. But I think there's a bunch of legal issues with that. But I think those are basically the two options you have. I don't think putting it back into the chart is a good idea. Seriously. I'm so curious also. And you know, you mentioned that you have this experience with the courts. Like, do you feel like the likelihood of some kind of legal action against any? Yeah, in Argentina or the U.S.? In Argentina? I was actually Yeah, not fun. I was actually cited by Christina Fernanda de Kurchner's lawyer, who is a famous politician here, famously stole a lot of money herself. And they're basically bringing a case against Malay. And they cited me as for like evidence.

Your Twitter post? Yeah, like extensive. It's like a page. So I woke up this morning to that, finding out I might have to testify in Argentine court, which was fun. Oh my gosh. For someone I really don't like. So there's already, that's already happening. I know that Christina Fernanda is the Kirchner's lawyer is like one of multiple lawyers that are probably going to do this. For like non-Argentine people context, it's about to be like Argentine midterms, right? and Malay just had a fantastic data report in that inflation was really low and poverty actually decreased

significantly, according to the National Institute for statistics. So this is also going to be seized on politically because it's a great way for the opposition to be like, hey, like they can't really fight them on the fundamentals. Like everything's doing pretty well. But they can be like, what the fuck was this meme coin? So I think there's going to be a bunch of stuff in Argentina that's already, there's a bunch that I've already said they're going to launch a lawsuit. I know of people in Argentina that are trying to figure out a way to actually sue some of the KIP people and to go after Hayden. But I think that takes more time because those are like with cases within Argentina, it's easier because it's like all in one jurisdiction.

What makes this really complicated is like, well, say like the Argentine government or like a trader that lost a lot of money wants to sue Hayden. Do they sue them in Argentina? Do they sue them in the States? If the traders in Singapore, do they sue them in Singapore or do they have to do it in the States because that's where Hayden is? There's a lot of like jurisdiction problems that I think are going to be complicated. But I think that'll just make it take like two or three weeks more and then we're going to see a lot more. of these lawsuits. Like, I think there's that one law firm that always publish posts on Twitter. Like, if you've been impacted by this crypto thing, you know, join our class action. So there's

definitely at least one that's going to happen. Well, this reminds me, you alluded to this earlier in the conversation, but you also mentioned this in your post about how Hayden and maybe his dad are bragging about, or they had bragged about trying to bribe government officials or people close to the government in Argentina. And then you wrote, this is illegal under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which is an American law. But enforcement's been like under the current admin, which by the way, I support the current U.S. admin.

I have photos with the big man. But they suspended, you know, one of the things he ran on was like law and order. And they've suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the U.S., which I didn't know. Oh. But it is illegal. Trump. Yeah.

Okay. Oh, wow. I did not know that they had done that, but they might have done it because they wanted to not have that case go forward against Eric Adams, which. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I wonder if.

I don't know if they would support Eric Adams, though, because Eric Adams is Democrat, right? So I think probably. He's a Democrat, but they know. So maybe you don't know this. This is like a fun fact section of the interview. what happened was, so he's, yes, a Democrat, but he allegedly took bribes from Turkey. And interestingly, what happened is when the current, it's like Second Command under the Attorney General ordered that the case against him be stopped.

The like six or seven prosecutors all resigned because they refused. They said the reasons that you're stating for why you don't want to move forward have nothing to do with the case itself. it's because I guess Eric Adams agreed to do, I scratch your, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours kind of deal where he said that he would help the Trump administration carry out their like a legal immigration initiative or whatever. If the case got dropped. So the fun fact portion of this is that the first prosecutor who kicked this all off

and resigned and refused to go forward with it is the same prosecutor who prosecuted SBF, Danielle Sassoon. She is very famous because she was so expert in the jury room. I watched her in person and all of us reporters were super scared of her because she was clearly like so, so amazing at her job. But anyway, so I was just like, oh, this is like a interesting intersection of, you know, crypto and something unrelated outside of this world. But the point is so, I guess if it's suspended in the U.S. then maybe it would. But it's also, it's suspended in the U.S. I don't know what the statute of limitations is, though.

So if the statute of limitations tends to be around 20 years, I am not a lawyer. So that means they're admitting to something that eventually, unless this law gets knocked from the books, they can be prosecuted for pretty easily because they've admitted to multiple people, at least privately in DMs. And I think it wouldn't be that hard to prove. it. Okay. Yeah. But it's it's another case though of like a law that is a law but doesn't feel like a law. Well, apparently in the U.S. it is not at the moment. They enforced. So I don't know if you caught this. This was one other interesting thing in that confi's an interview, but he said that the Malay team wanted to do a deal with

Dave Portnoy so he could cross promote the coin. That, That was news. Dave Portnoy has, yeah, been a weird player in this whole thing. I think he's just trying to save himself. Like, he's like wildly flailing. Like he like outed the Melania out of the Trump team about how you could buy into the token at 500 million before it launched. Basically as like a look like these guys are bad too. I don't think that I think that probably he thought that he could get the Malay team to agree to something like that. I don't think the Malay team was actively involved being like, oh, yeah, no.

Now what we definitely have to do is like get Dave Portnoy of all people involved. That sounds very weird to me. Well, so, you know, this Dave Portnoy thing has been interesting because last week I, on the chopping block, did say disparaging things about him. I need to admit that right now. I was not kind about what I perceived as his intelligence or lack thereof. But apparently he was, you know, offered like early participation in this. And he did not want to do it unless he could disclose transparently what was going on to his followers. And they'd not allow that.

And so then, so that first came out. So he kind of like, what's the word, like lifted the veil on a lot of what was going on behind the scenes. And then the other thing that happened is that afterward, he. wait oh my god i'm just like you got refunded no right right he he he revealed that that they offered to refund him which you know everybody was upset about that because obviously like oh so so everybody else can lose money but like famous people like dave pornoi can be refunded people who don't know famous people have famous people have platforms that they can yell at hayden from average people don't have platforms they can yell at hayden from yeah so i don't know if you have

other commentary about that, but I just... I mean, that sounds like, one, probably is something that they would say, especially because like, think about if, like, put yourself in the unsavory position of being in Hayden shoes. You know, for some reason you wear Montclair, X, Palm Angels, hoodies to apology videos, and now you have to deal with this whole mess. your main focus is one trying to figure out how the conversation with the Argentine government probably is, which I imagine is probably somewhat shot, because technically he's still an advisor to the president. He should, like, he's, I think.

Surprise, he's not been fired yet. Yeah, he should be out. But then, so once you do that, the next big step is, like, who was behind the veil, as you mentioned? How can you make sure that, like, a lot of the people, Because, again, there was like a structure of like some people got in and they bought it, but they weren't in from the start. So a decent amount of people actually lost money. So in the event that that happened, it's probably very advantageous for him to basically, it's functionally like a hush payment, like a hush money payment to get these big guys with large platforms that knew how this whole thing worked and could kind of reveal it to basically be quiet about it. I just think port noise seems to be, to put it politely stupid and not realize that that was the unofficial arrangement because he just keeps talking on Twitter and keeps digging him and Hayden a deeper and deeper hole.

Okay. So maybe my comments last week were not too far off the mark. I don't understand how he, because he went on Twitter and was like, I am totally fine with like the fact that I got refunded being public. like it's no big deal. I would have refunded him. And it's like, okay, you're saying if you had made a scam project and you had taken money from your friend, but you would have given it back, like it's so tone deaf. It would be like, you know, you're robbing a bank and then you recognize your buddy. And you're like, oh, I'm sorry, not his account. You do the same for me. Like, you're still doing something wrong.

You're working with those people. Like I, yeah. It's, that's probably, I would not be surprised though with the Portnard story that that didn't happen with a bunch of other people where Hayden was just doing damage control. And went to everyone was like,

hey, hush, hush, this is our story. Keep to the story and you get, you will get refunded. Yeah. Yeah. Again, I just go back to my original thoughts. And all the comments I made last week I said on that show were comments that were,

it was just my very first impression from the very first time I ever heard him speak. And yes, you are revealing that it's all pretty accurate. Yeah, there's not a lot going on in that. Okay. So let's talk a little bit more about this fallout in Argentina because, you know, we were talking about this a little bit before we started recording. But Argentina is one of the places in the world that was one of the earliest, you know, nations that were, was into crypto or Bitcoin, really.

You know, your father, obviously, once it's Casares, he's very famously called Patient Zero in Silicon Valley for Bitcoin. You know, I don't know kind of how it's evolved. Like, I know from that era what it was for a lot of people. But, you know, in the years since, is it something that crypto has generally been quite popular there? Or like... Argentina is one of the only countries in the world where crypto is used pretty significantly for like day-to-day transactions. There's companies like lemon cash, like Bello, you know, Satoshi Tango, a lot of these other

I'm probably Buenbit. There's probably a bunch of other ones that I'm forgetting off the top of my head that allow you to have, to buy and trade crypto, but also to have, to actually have access to dollars via USDC or other stable coins being Latin American tether is very common. And oftentimes those accounts are used similarly to bank accounts, right? People hold their money there, they earn interest on their accounts. They pay for food using cards that use money from these accounts. It had the industry in Argentina was like pretty, like Vitalik shout out.

outs it out, the circle guys shouted out, the Coinbase guy shouted out as like a pretty good, almost like end state shower of like what crypto can do in society. Like it's used for payments, it's used for savings. It's actually used as a replacement to a lot of these other systems, which is another reason why people in the industry were so upset because the local industry in Argentina had a really, really good reputation for being one of the few industries that actually was finding a market need and filling that with crypto. And this whole thing is going to be like a cloud over the local industry for a while. And are you sensing at the moment that everyday Argentines have kind of turned against crypto?

No, this is like, I don't think it was crypto. Like, if Malay had done, you know, like a penny stock or something, although I'm, to be clear, I'm not saying he would have, but I'm just saying if the situation was in some way different, even like if it was like a casino or something, people would have been upset and people probably would not have liked what happened. But it's more a political thing. It's not like, none of the news articles in Argentina are like, okay, they, they're. This is a great example of why crypto should be regulated.

Like, that's probably what would come out in the U.S. In Argentina, there are regulations for crypto. There are a bunch of things about this. Maybe not necessarily around meme coins. Maybe it's not super clear. But for like the wallets and venues that interact with everyday people are very, very regulated. So it's only, it's more so it's not been an anti-crypto thing as much as the whole mess of the people around it and the background is not great. And it's like a national pride thing

for a lot of people. All right. So at this moment, Malay announced that he is launching an investigation into what happened. He's also facing calls for impeachment. So what do you think will be the overall impact on him? The opposition has called for impeachment on Malay more times than I've called my mom on this trip, right? Like, they just do it a lot. And I'm a good, I'm a good Latino son. So I call my mom. They've done it a lot.

They would do it for any real reason. It's going to be a cloud over him. I think it's very good that he's saying that this should be investigated. It doesn't look great, though, that the investigation is going to be managed under, like, within the presidential, like, executive branch. If that makes sense, because it's a bit like me saying my brother's going to investigate me for corruption. I don't think anyone would trust the findings of that. But at the same time, it's also important to understand in Argentina that a lot of these departments are politicized or are run by political appointees.

So in doing so, he might genuinely be trying to figure out what's going on without letting, you know, giving control over to someone that. might be in the hands of the opposition party. So I think that's good. I think a lot of these court cases are going to move forward. I don't think Malay still has very heavy support. People are like more than anything, it's like a lot of disappointment, if that makes sense. The people that like are really upset about this are really upset about it.

But more so it's like even his supporters and like I normally would consider myself a supporter just because I do believe he actually thinks that he's doing. something good for the country. It's just like disappointing, right? It's not something where you're like, oh yeah, the other options are better. The person who filed this complaint where I was mentioned in was, I'm pretty sure convicted for stealing a billion dollars plus. Like that is like, and like from the government, not like, you know, some foreign Americans that copy pasted a contract address. So, yeah. In general, it's, I don't, I think he'll survive this. I think he has to respond to it deftly just to make people not lose faith in him being this honest guy that he's

been up until this point. But I don't think it's going to sink him. It's going to be a very big test for them, but I don't think it'll sink him. All right. And well, actually, just last quick thing. So we're going to release this tomorrow. So I know this will come after his public statement on TV Monday night, but is there anything that you like hope he would say or that you expect him to say? I hope he gives like he's given some, um, some public statements. But I think if he were to give a full explanation of like, sure, he met with these guys at some point.

But then who eventually actually was the person who said that this was this idea would go forward. Why did that person think that way? Was it a mistake? Like I think he can, even if like it was a really stupid mistake, I think the transparency that the Malay is known for, if he's able to show it here as well and just be like, hey, like, I didn't know I fucked up is a lot better than him trying to like cover for someone.

because right now if you talk to an average origin time, they're like, Malay stole money. And that's not what happened. You know, Hayden has it all in his wallet. So I think for his own sake, he has to be transparent about what happened. And ideally, you know, probably kick someone out of the admin that was involved in that. But that's not, that's the president's decision to make, not mine. All right. Well, as you said earlier, you got into crypto through meme coins.

So I was interested to hear your thoughts on like what the impact of all this will be on meme coins and even by extension on Solana. So I think one, I think that it's very impressive how many very high quality people that are young and that want to do stuff in crypto gravitate towards Solana. I feel that the foundation or Foundation dash Salana Labs, whatever it is, Salana in general. and the founders are way more active working with people and founders in general than the Ethereum Foundation, which is kind of often an ivory tower, I do think that they've overemphasized meme coins. And meme coins kind of rose as like a response to VC coins. But like anything where there's capital formation, eventually meme coins went from like, oh, it's just a meme coin made by my boy that I know from this and it has a funny name.

Let's try and get people to buy into it to something like this where it's like an industrial scale level operation that has the same types of insiders that people originally wanted to avoid by buying into meme coins. So it literally just has like kind of completed a full cycle. I think that probably meme coins like this that have all these people behind it won't go. away, but that people will like meme points that don't necessarily launch, you know, at a $2 billion valuation or whatever. Well, I think that was the height of this one, but like a $500 million dollar valve or whatever. Very similar to how people don't really back VC projects, you know, launch at a high float

or a high FDV of like $10 billion, even though, you know, the market cap is like $500 million. I think that basically we're seeing the death of low-float, high-fd-v, yeah, in the meme-coin side of it, things, if that makes sense. Yeah, well, let's hope. So, Dio, this has been such a great conversation. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you would want to add? I don't think so. All right, well, where can people learn more about you, Andrew, work? I'm on Twitter, Diogenes, which she's spelled Dio-G-E.

N-E-S, Casares, yes. I tend to post almost everything there. Yeah. Perfect. Well, it's been a pleasure having you on Unchained. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Dio and the Libra scandal, check out the show notes for this episode.

Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Matt Pilchard, Warner Manovich, Megan Gavis, Pamich, and Margaret Curia. Thanks for listening.