You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Venezuela, Debt & the Case for Bitcoin Loans - Mauricio Di Bartolomeo | Ep. 141

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

Mauricio Di Bartolomeo is the Co-founder of Ledn, the leader in Bitcoin-backed lending. He grew up in Venezuela, living through the early tremors of what would become one of the most dramatic monetary collapses in modern history, before coming to Canada in 2003. His front-row seat to hyperinflation under Chavez and Maduro shaped a deeply practical understanding of how money, debt, and institutional trust actually function, and gave him the conviction to build Ledn, which has issued over $10 billion in loans since 2018 and holds an estimated 30% market share in consumer Bitcoin-backed lending globally. We cover what hyperinflation actually feels like from the inside, why the wealthy borrow while everyone else is told to save, the philosophical debate over whether Bitcoin-backed debt is morally sound, and what the recent seismic shifts in Venezuela's political landscape mean for an oppressed country. → Please like, comment, share & follow — to help me beat the suppressing algo's. Thank you!– SPONSORS –→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat    → Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines: https://AbundantMines.com/Efrat - Claim your free month of hosting via this link– AFFILIATES –→ Join me in these upcoming events & use code EFRAT for discounted tickets: https://www.efrat.blog/p/upcoming-events→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox Spike protein, with the code YCXKQDK2 via this link: https://store.augmentednac.com/?via=efrat (Note, this is not medical advice, please consult your MD)→ Join me at Europe’s largest bitcoin conference - BTC Prague, June 11-13, 2026. Code EFRAT for 10% off: http://btcprg.me/EFRAT→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero blue light & flicker. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight → Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - code EFRAT for 10% off: https://efenigson.gumroad.com/l/desmet_efrat– LINKS –Mauricio on X: https://twitter.com/cryptonomista More about Ledn: https://ledn.io/EfratEfrat’s X: https://twitter.com/efenigsonEfrat’s Channels: https://linktr.ee/efenigsonWatch on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoiceSupport Efrat’s work: ⁠https://bit.ly/zap_efrat– CHAPTERS – 00:00 - Coming Up...01:24 - Introduction: Mauricio Di Bartolomeo03:28 - The First Bitcoin Asset-backed securities (ABS) Bond07:26 - Institutional Appetite: S&P Ratings & the ABS Market10:25 - How Bitcoin-Backed Loans Work: Risk, Liquidation & Trust14:15 - Ad Break: Ledn, Trezor & Abundant Mines17:10 - Debt as a Tool: The Bitcoin-Backed Loan Philosophy19:48 - Venezuela & Chavez: Growing Up With Inflation21:34 - Inflation vs. Hyperinflation: Two Different Phenomena29:20 - Surviving Hyperinflation: Your Second Job Is Converting Your Paycheck31:29 - Shorting Fiat: How the Wealthy Use Debt to Build Wealth39:18 - Debt and Bitcoin43:21 - Venezuela: Frozen in Time44:55 - Signs of Hope: What Changed on January 3rd48:30 - Bitcoin 2026: Conference Outlook

hyperinflation means you have lost complete trust in your country you lost trust in your government you lost trust in the institutions that protect you as a citizen you lost trust in the army you've lost trust in every single person that's meant to protect you you woke up one day and all of a sudden the hope you thought of democratic change resulted in the actual nightmare of more authoritarianism you look at your kids you look at your significant other and you say we gotta get out of here. You have two jobs. You have the job that starts at nine and ends at five and your second job after five is getting rid of your paycheck. People take advantage of this. Debt is one of those things that if you learn how to use it properly, it will give you a massive

tailwind in the fiat world. Debt and loans are like any tool. If you use a hammer right, you're gonna build that house faster. If you use the hammer wrong, you can hurt a finger. When you When you use a Bitcoin-backed loan, you are never a slave to that debt. You own that Bitcoin. Why would you be long fiat? The government is short fiat. Hyperinflation is not rational, it's emotional. It's an emotional response to a stressful situation.

Inflation is a rational response to a change in economic conditions. Welcome to another episode of You're The Voice. Efrat here from Vegas, Bitcoin 2026. Happy to sit here with my friend Maurizio. How are you, Maurizio? I am very good. I'm happy we're getting to do this finally. Finally.

I know. We've been the traveling circus, meeting each other in all kinds of weird corners around the globe. And we didn't sit down to do this properly. Good things take time. I know. I know. And I'm so glad also to know that you're meeting some of my good friends in some of those events around the world, like Simon and Tina and some others, like Pete Evans.

Shout out to the Aussies because they're getting me into the foil board. I'm going a little sideways, but... Are you doing surfing? Yeah. Thanks to them? Well, no, they're trying to get me into a foil board, which is an e-foil drive. Yes. And it's a very Australian thing.

It's really only a thing there. It's a new type of foil. but anyway the australians are very into it and they're every time i see them they show me photos and they sell me on why i should get one and i get so much fomo um these are my friends let's go great people they're just great people and great bitcoiners so yes i'm so glad you're meeting the small world you know so yeah awesome all right so first of all disclaimer leaden is a sponsor of this show thank you very much for helping me pursue my mission which is shedding light on hidden truths and i love working with you guys because i think what you do is important especially

for people like me that are living more or less already on a bitcoin standard and so if i do need fiat liquidity i can get it through taking a loan instead of selling my bitcoin which is something i never want to do so this is why i love working with you guys and i believe in what you do do you want to just give us a short uh brief on what it is that you're introducing here at the show well at the show where the big news that we've had recently the the sort of headline for 2026 has been the first ever bitcoin bond uh and so we february this year we announced the first ever bitcoin abs bond that is a institutional product where for the first time ever we've packaged up bitcoin back loans into a bond offering and we've sold that bond offering into the market

as they do with mortgages as they do with auto loans as they do with credit card debt and this is really the most sophisticated transparent and resilient funding structure that you can use for consumer credit and so this is the first time bitcoin has ever made to this market. A consumer Bitcoin loan has made it into this market. It was the first time S&P Global has rated a Bitcoin product. Rated BBB? BBB minus, which is investment grade. Okay. And this is the first investment grade product in the history of Bitcoin. And this is very important because in the lending world a lending product has two clients. There's the person borrowing the dollars and the

person supplying the dollars. So as you grow the origination side of the business, you also in parallel have to grow the funding side of the business. So Bitcoin backed loans today are a multi trillion or multi-billion dollar market. We estimate the size to be at the consumer level, about three billion dollars. And Ledin, we estimate, has a 30 percent market share. So one in three Bitcoin backed loans done globally are done at Ledin. We believe that the way you say consumer, so it doesn't include institutions. It's just retail.

So if you include institutions, there's a few lenders out there that only lend to bitcoin treasury companies that only lend to miners and they just on a numbers perspective they have a bigger amount of loans outstanding but they have a lot less clients so that's considered an institutional book so if your book has ten billion dollars with ten one billion dollar loans is very different than having a three billion one billion dollar book with 50,000 loans in it And if you are a bondholder, typically you want diversification of that book, because if you're bankrolling a bond that's, say our bond right now, to give you an example, our bond was a $200 million facility with roughly 5,000 loans vended into it. So as those loans get repaid, Lennon has multiples of additional loans that can be vended into the facility so that it always has $200 million.

And so that's really important. If that facility instead was four $50 million loans and two got repaid, it's really hard. So for a consumer credit, the book has to have certain attributes in order to qualify or be palatable to go into that market. And so we were the first ones to ever package up consumer Bitcoin-backed loans into a bond that went to the ABS, received an investment rating from S&P. and the real there's a lot of breakthroughs in that issuance but a few that i'll mention is you know we at let and believe that bitcoin by glows is going to be a trillion dollar market in five to ten years from now so in order to uh the demand is there and the asset will support it where are the dollars going to come from what market is deep enough so that you can go borrow

a trillion dollars and you know and it have enough and it keep getting you money well the answer is the abs market the abs market just in the u.s on consumer products only is roughly 1.85 trillion dollars okay today and in that market right now there's 200 million dollars worth of bitcoin that are in there tiny and right now it's a small fraction but we estimate that that's going to grow So to become a material share of the ABS market. What kind of players do you think will come into that? Well, in our bond, we had, which was interesting. So Jefferies is the investment bank that ran the book.

And we booked over 50 meetings with institutions during the roadshow. Jefferies told us this is the ABS that they've booked most meetings for in the history of them offering ABSs. So we had 50 meetings, more than 50, but I think they booked 50 and we had a few others. And we had 15 different institutions participating in the offering. We had insurance companies, reinsurance companies, pension, I believe, credit funds. So they are becoming aware. So the education is in place. They are discovering appetite to those kind of products.

The offering was two times oversubscribed on the senior tranche. three times over subscriber junior tranche and i would say that a hundred percent what you said they are getting it yeah i would say it's not they're curious uniform the knowledge isn't uniform some some entities have much deeper knowledge than others but they all have openness now to listening yes and obviously when you get an smp rating that's investment grade that's really helpful because S&P and the rating agencies really do a lot of the heavy lifting for understanding the risk right like S&P spent a year with us basically understanding every aspect of our business our liquidation engine our history we needed to show them tape dating back to COVID

dating back to Alameda and FTX ensuring that our systems had run perfectly during stress and more so when we were selling the bond in February when the market was coming down many of these institutions this was the first time of them this was the first product that was ever available to them in the in a Bitcoin format or the first Bitcoin product they've ever had in front of them yeah that's investable and so their questions many times were how do I know your system is going to liquidate in time how do I know that you know you guys are to be able to recover these loans that that you know people don't top up or they don't they default on the loan and funny enough we were pitching the deal as the market was dropping and so in real

time we were able to pull up data showing them listen the system is working as designed yeah and you could see it almost you know the the response was basically like wow the meme you guys just basically were able to liquidate all the defaulted loans and you and everybody paid you back and this happened in minutes and you didn't have to evict the person from a house and foreclose the property and put it in that's what they don't get about the asset about bitcoin itself they are starting to get now they're getting it because they're seeing how it works and not that i'm happy that people are being liquidated correct like from from a lender's perspective and from a borrower's perspective because the key to these products is you have to plan appropriately and use them

responsibly yes that's not to say that even if you plan appropriately and use them like as responsible as you can there can't be a black swan event that moves the market more than you would expect it right like there will always be a chance like that there's nothing's fail-proof but i will tell you i've been doing this for more than eight years and the reason lead and grows is because if our clients grow with it like if our product wasn't helping people they would stop using it right right and so what we see is the opposite we see is people use it and then they come back again and again and again and then many times I've had clients even clients in the recent downturn where

they're when they had one or many many clients have multiple loans like I have with clients that have 50 loans sometimes a lot more and some clients they have one or their loans got liquidated and so I'll be having a call with them to talk about their loans and basically make sure that everything went right or you know get his feedback on the liquidation and they're and you know the response is like no i get it i'm a big boy like i knew the rules and this is this is on me this is not on you guys and so to me that's a huge testament to our work right i've you know sometimes sometimes you see people where they will say you know oh man my letting loan was liquidated or somebody but then you'll

see an ocean of people underneath being yeah you let it get to 80 like that you obviously you let it get to 80 like they would never liquidate a loan if you did what you need to do and so the fact that we have so many people that have now had a great experience with let in and they can basically say well no if i'd let in if you plan properly you're going to have a great experience if you don't plan properly you might have your loan liquidated but that's not on let in that's really they told you the rules it was clear from the start and you chose to you know take take or size it in a certain way or not leave extra bitcoin on the side so for us it's really key that people understand the product because nobody we don't want to liquidate people people

don't come to us because oh i want to get a letter known because i'm going to get liquidated we understand that's not the outcome people come to us for no your vision is to give them liquidation when they need the money. I want to give them the money when they need it. And I want to never have to liquidate that Bitcoin unless I absolutely have to. And you have to do this as uncomfortable as it may be when the price is dropping.

And the reality is nobody knows if it's going to bounce back or when it's going to bounce back. If we do not take action and liquidate client loans, and by the way, at Ledin, that is a process that is automated and it has no human intervention. there is no there's no human judgment no human judgment this is this is math this is science like it does not require anything because then when you put in humans you mess it up and so for us it's fully automated process we will give you the rules we'll give you all the

tools available to protect it you get auto top up you can send bitcoin from external you can send bitcoin from let in you can prepay the loan on stable coins instantly you can send a fiat partial repayment yeah right so we'll we'll give you all the gamut to not get liquidated but if it has to happen yeah we have to do this because we need to protect the integrity of the business if we decide to be nice to somebody and don't liquidate that person that load goes underwater if that happens too many times the business goes underwater so that's not what letting's here for letting's here for ensuring that if you do everything right you're going to get that bitcoin back yeah that's the whole point of that right you know is there a risk of liquidation if you don't plan it right

yes unfortunately that is the reality of lending against bitcoin yeah um but i said what i see in the numbers and what i hear from my clients is that if you use this product right and you take the time to understand it you're gonna have a great experience ever find yourself needing cash but refusing to sell your bitcoin that's real life for many bitcoiners because most bitcoin sales aren't financial decisions, they're liquidity decisions. And that's exactly what Ledin solves. Ledin is the global leader in Bitcoin-backed lending. They've issued over $10 billion in loans since 2018 with a perfect track record for protecting client assets. Here's what makes Ledin different. With their custodied loans, your Bitcoin collateral is

not lent out to generate interest. No credit checks, no monthly payments, and no penalties for early repayments. You apply in minutes and you repay whenever you want. Ledin also publishes proof of reserves reports every six months with full transparency. So if your capital is in Bitcoin, but your expenses are not, you still have options.

Ledin lets you unlock liquidity without selling your Bitcoin. Learn more at ledin.io slash efrat. That's L-E-D-N dot I-O slash efrat. You're the Voice is brought to you by Trezor, the original Bitcoin hardware wallet company pioneering the development of self-custody for crypto assets since 2013, empowering individuals with an open source device, enabling beginners and experts to easily and securely hold their coins.

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machines. They never touch your Bitcoin, never skim a revenue share, and you choose your own mining pool. Their customer care is unusual. Clients speak to a real person for self-custody education, privacy consulting, and even visiting their site. They serve clients from around the world, but U.S. investors specifically enjoy a big tax benefit and 100% bonus depreciation. This is more than just mining Bitcoin. It's about freedom, privacy, and purpose. You can book a free strategy call, see how it works, and mine some of your first Bitcoin for free with a special offer from my audience. Learn more on AbundantMinds.com. I think the biggest difference from what we know from the traditional commercial banking system

is that financial institutions and banks will encourage you to continue rolling on your debt and taking more loans just because it's fiat and the debt has to continue growing. Whereas you guys, what backs you up is Bitcoin in the end of the day. And you're like, I don't want to create more debt for people just because they have taken a loan. I want to give them a tool to help them when they need it, when they choose to use it.

But I will also educate them about how to use it so that they don't lose that asset. Fiat is designed to make you lose the asset. Well, that works for the system. It's right. It is. And you know what? In a fiat world, debt is one of those things that if you learn how to use it properly, it will give you a massive tailwind in the fiat world.

debt and loans are like any tool if you use a hammer right you're gonna build that house faster yes if you use the hammer wrong you can hurt a finger right so it's like there's like any power tool if you you if you use it appropriately you apply it at the right time in the right place with the right size you're gonna do great it's gonna make you move a little faster right at letter you can repay your loans at any time yeah we don't want people to hold debt for any longer than they need it and in fact i actually prefer that because i don't want anybody to take a loan they don't feel they need that's not going to keep them coming back yes and so you know we've had clients that i sometimes i run into clients and they're like mal i just wanted to give you a heads up

because i'm gonna repay my loan and you know he's okay i'm like i'm like it's that's cool that's totally fine man like i know you don't i mean i know it's not personal like please i i actually am happy for you please repay the loan great we're fine yeah uh and so because people come back when need it again like a loan is a thing you don't need all the time exactly and if you want to we have clients that use our loans to buy homes and they use them like basically like a mortgage so they roll and they roll they roll and that's fine that's not what the product's designed to do but that's their take they're making that decision we're not we're not pushing debt on anybody or asking them to take a loan in fact i i i think actually that that is one of the most off-putting

things that you can have as a person as a client is somebody trying to push you on something you don't need yeah we don't we don't we've never been that way yeah and we don't we don't feel like at least to the good long-term totally yeah yeah it's off-putting totally all right I want to pivot a little bit and talk to you about your background and and a bit about Venezuela you grew up there in Venezuela under what how do you pronounce today Chavez Chavez Chavez most people in the west they understand hyperinflation as an economic concept every time we we remind people that such a thing actually happened in the history of their country they can yeah right there was

like 30 40 50 years ago it happened but it lives like this you know not not real thing and you lived it as a daily emotional reality can you share a little bit what does hyperinflation actually feel from the inside? And what does it do to people's behavior, their trust and their sense of reality? Great question. Give us like a timeline. Like when, when was that? So which period? So Venezuela has always been a country ever since I was young before Chavez that runs a triple digit inflation. That's like a baseline. Venezuelan inflation on a mild day is a hundred percent annualized right like that's just and that's a that's a super manageable level in venezuela and you learn you learn about it pretty quickly on but i'll make a distinction between

inflation and hyperinflation because i know even though a hundred percent inflation sounds bad it's not hyperinflation hyperinflation and inflation um i feel that and i've made this point before but i think it's important like a lot of people confuse hyperinflation and inflation and hyperinflation as if hyperinflation is just a bad case of inflation. It's just like an accelerated case of inflation. It's just a higher number. But I would argue that they're entirely different phenomenons. Inflation, as we know inflation to be, is a rational response by economic actors to an increase in the money supply without an equal proportionate increase in the asset base so if you have in in a let's just say you have a town ecosystem and the town

has 10 buildings and in the building there's 10 units of money or in the in the town so again if you were to price each building each building would be one coin right but if you added 10 more tokens or 10 more coins into that ecosystem with keeping the same number of buildings very quickly those buildings will go to two right that's inflation that is the owners of the building reacting to an increase in the number of units or money units and saying oh well now there's more money units it's the same amount of buildings so my building is worth more units like that's a normal thing right and and the response will be if the number of units doubled the price of my building doubles it's a rational linear reaction hyperinflation is not that hyperinflation means you have lost

complete trust in your country you you you lost trust in your government you lost trust in the institutions that protect you as a citizen you lost trust in the army you've lost trust in every single person that's meant to protect you and when when that hits as the hits when you're in venezuela you say okay i have to fire sell and liquidate everything you liquidate your assets you liquidate your currency in a liquid thought about it that way so you're saying it's like that is the reaction of the public to loss of trust in institutions when you in complete loss of trust so i'm talking maduro stealing the 2013 elections yes right i'm talking on national television basically ignoring the the popular results on national television

ignoring election results ignoring international government bodies shooting protesters yes blocking access to dollars blocking access to bitcoin that's what happens when hyper that that's the environment in which hyperinflation comes to be and so what ends up the how it manifests in in the flesh like how you or me would react yeah it was like this i'm not you're leaving my my energy and wealth in this you woke up one day and all of a sudden the hope you thought of put democratic change resulted in an actual nightmare of more authoritarianism and you're seeing young people get shot as they're protesting and so your your reaction is you look at your kids you look at your significant other and you say we got to get out of here and we got to get out

out of here like now and so you will list your house and you'll start basically clearing off your assets your house at that point you're going to put a price on it because you kind of have to because of a formality but there are no bids you will take any bid that comes your way even if it's half the price you wanted right it's the same thing goes for the currency it's right like you're leaving tomorrow yes you need to get rid of the currency which the government has suddenly made illegal for you to get out of so you now have to do it in these parallel markets where there's no bank to protect you you have to send somebody oftentimes you have to give somebody cash and give that cash from that person it's risky and so in that environment you are taking say you have

a million bolivars okay and you want to buy however many dollars as are available yeah the government isn't selling you dollars nobody wants to sell you their dollars because everybody's leaving yes so the person on the other side with the dollars you know the government will say oh it's a hundred bolívares for dollars like that's the government exchange rate but this person that you found will say sorry well those are not for sale then you can buy them for a hundred i have them for sale you can buy them for me but i'll sell them to you for two thousand two thousand bolívares and at that point you have a choice your choice is oh man that's not a fair price I'm just gonna wait. I'm just gonna wait one more day. As the country continues to collapse and as

the risk around you continues to shoot higher, you have no time to wait for the fair market price. You will take whatever you will get you can get. And so you make a trade and you buy X amount of dollars for 2,000 bolívares a pop, right? That trade doesn't get recorded anywhere. There's no evidence that you paid that amount of money so there's only like an anecdotal number that people are paying hyperinflation is a fire sale of your assets and your currency it's a sale where you it's almost like a blind desperation it's a blind bid you're saying i will take the best offer for this currency or this asset yes and there is no negotiating as you take what it is and you get out whatever you can this the prices are set on the margin right it's it's always that next person

and when everybody's desperate the margin just grows very fast exponentially oh yes and so hyperinflation is not rational it's emotional it's an emotional response to a stressful situation inflation is a rational response to a change in economic conditions hyperinflation is an irrational emotional response it's a spiral um to to a debt to a near-death or high-risk situation and so what that feels like yeah um so we all go to our banks i'll give you an example when you go to the when you go to the atm today in the us you have a limit you can only withdraw two thousand dollars right like that's the max you can take for whatever reason okay okay today with two thousand dollars you can buy a decent amount of things right okay let's just say that the the value of

the us dollar goes down by 200 overnight okay so now all of a sudden the the atm limit it has the purchasing power of 500 so now you can go to the atm and oh man okay so you only get 500 so that that goes a lot less right the next day it drops by another 200 and so it will continue happening again until your atm withdrawal limits is going to be a dollar oh my god and you're going to be getting basically a lot of bills this big but the purchasing power is a dollar and so you cannot buy a coffee and so you have to do multiple withdrawals to pay for a coffee oh my god right so the same goes for your credit card limit today a five thousand dollar credit card limit might be a good thing but if the purchasing power of that goes to five dollars your credit card becomes

useless you can no longer use credit cards and so in in hyperinflationary environment the first thing the governments do is they shut down the exits so they they've blocked your access to dollars right so when they block your access to dollars you you have to they're forcing you to transact the bolivars but no method of payment actually works the credit card has a five dollar limit the uh interact transfers or interbank transfers have a hundred dollar limit the acm gives you two dollars yeah and so people by necessity start operating on black market dollars right because it's the only thing that you can use one or two bills for to pay and not a massive amount of things right and so it it's that and then imagine if your currency is dropping

200 day after day you get paid on a friday in venezuela and hyperinflation you have two jobs you have the job that starts at nine and ends at five and your second job after five is getting rid of your paycheck oh my god right and on a daily basis no it happens on like every two weeks every two fridays right like you'll have but that second friday if you don't move fast you lose the entire two weeks work right and so that second job becomes more important than your first job so on paydays you'll have people begging you to get out early they're please let me get out at noon please let me get out at two so i can get rid of my currency to keep what i made and you're sitting there feeling helpless you should yeah go like please go i hope your trade works out

oftentimes you'll hear somebody come back and say you know somebody let's say somebody made 200 for those two weeks right 200 equivalent right so they get their bolívares and then they go get the dollars yes that person went with x number of bolívares hoping to get 200 they made a trade and they got two fake 50s your week there's nothing there's nothing a week a week of your work is gone you can't go after that person you can't sue that person there's no recourse, you can go to the police. And so people take advantage of this. Yes. And usually what happens in hyperinflation is that the wealthy always have access to loans and always have access to dollars through their offshore accounts. So what the wealthy will do is they will go to the

bank, they will borrow olivares from the bank at whatever percent, because the bank will say, I'll give you this trade. I made this trade many times. You borrow from the bank at 24%, which in any American context, you would be, my God, that's insane, right? But you're borrowing this at 24%. Why? Because inflation is running at 5,000%. So if I'm borrowing at 24% and I use that money to buy dollars, all I have to do is wait.

I'm actually being allowed to print. Does that make sense? It's like I got my own little printer. Isn't that a little bit similar to the Japan carry trade? It's very similar to a Bitcoin-backed loan. Right. It's effectively what it is. You're shorting a crappy currency to go long a hard asset.

It's what a mortgage is. Yes. It is a mortgage. It is a Bitcoin-backed loan. It is a short on the currency. It is a yen carry trade. This is the biggest financial mortgage or a loan to, a fiat loan to buy a hard asset is the financial instrument, in my opinion, that has built the most wealth for the last

three to five generations in the fiat system. because those who know how to use it and but what does what do the powers that be tell us about that yeah debt is bad you should not take debt you should pay down your mortgage ask any wealthy person if they agree with any of that they are full of debt yes why would you be long fiat right the government is short fiat right why wouldn't you be it's just a psychological critical hurdles that they have to yeah it's like it's like buying when there's blood in the streets it feels uncomfortable right but if you do it guess what you're gonna do great and and one of the biggest disconnects is does the government save in dollars no the answer is no of course not

the government borrows dollars yes and they tell you to save in the same instrument that they are borrowing right the incentives are completely out of line they are incentivized to devalue the units in which their debt is priced you get hurt every time they do that so you essentially did the same trade that they do yes yes why go against the big fish but how many people get that hack how many people that live in such an environment actually understand that they should or could do something like that? It's a great question. And I think if you've lived in a hyperinflationary world,

all the numbers are magnified. So for example, when I was borrowing at 24 and inflation was 200, it's very clear math, right? Like 200 is a much bigger number than 50, right? Or 24. And so it makes complete sense. But when you're doing it in like a North American context, the numbers are not always as clear, right?

So it may be a 2% or a 1% margin. And you might think, oh, that's that doesn't that's not enough. But the thing is, if it's a if it's a guaranteed 1%. Why would you not? How many things are guaranteed? Very few things are guaranteed. But if you know that the government has to devalue its currency to settle its debt and you know that they can't print Bitcoin or they can't print the house,

what do you know what i'm saying like why would you own the stuff they can print and not the stuff they can't yes and so for me is i will borrow as much as of as much of their printable tokens as i can to collect hard assets for myself yes right because i know that over time i'll be able to sell a fraction of those assets to pay the tokens absolutely right and so i was fortunate in that i saw fortunate or unfortunate but in some ways i was fortunate that i witnessed the collapse of a currency in front row and it was funny because when i was growing up my dad who's a very savvy businessman he's the best he would always be so i had so my dad was an entrepreneur and i had my i had some friends whose parents were teachers okay and teachers

are an interesting group because teachers typically like doing things by the book and following you know the advice and so they were putting money mom yes you know they were putting money away every month for savings or paying down their mortgages they were doing the responsible thing right and they never get ahead meanwhile i was watching my dad pick up the phone at lunch being like what's the rate on it 40 yeah i'll take it what's the max what's the max and can the other can the other uh can the other guys give me extra okay yeah just tap it just tap the whole thing okay thank you quick and i would sit there and i was like oh my god is my dad crazy yeah he's doing he's doing all of the things that you're not supposed to do right but then i would watch

my dad take that debt buy assets with it and my dad was doing and i saw my dad thrive amazing and i saw these people stay behind and so i started asking questions i'm like why why is this broken Like, how can he be not following the rules and doing good? And these people following the rules are not doing good. Yes. And my dad, basically, my dad was a very astute person, right? Like, he understood that just because the government tells you that inflation is one thing, but your own eyes see something different.

Thank God. Which one are you going to use to invest? Which one are you going to use to invest on? Are you going to invest on what you're telling me or what you're seeing? Yes. You invest on what you're seeing. And if you see a disconnect between the two things, there's a big opportunity here. Because if you're telling me this, you're pricing the life, you're pricing the world as if inflation is 3%.

But inflation is 10. Yes. And so if I can borrow at 3 and invest at 10, why would I not? And that's really, like, this is, okay, I'll give you a perfect example. If you look at the 2025 US deficit, roughly $2 trillion. If you look at the 2025 U.S. M2 money supply, $22 trillion. How much is the monetary base getting the base by? 10%.

What does CPI say? Three? I don't know. CPI says three. Does it say three? CPI says three. Of course. So CPI measures food inflation. Sure.

And living inflation. And taking some stuff out. No asset inflation. Right. there's no and michael saylor said this all the time and it's the same in every western country it's not just in the u.s and and this is why most wealthy people i mean i'm yet i mean i'm sure there are some but most of the smartest people i know and the wealthiest people i know they don't pay down their mortgage right they take as much debt as they possibly can on the mortgage right and

i'm not suggesting that always max out every debt you can because obviously you have to if you buy If you take the debt or you don't buy a hard asset with it, you're not doing a good thing. You really want to use the debt responsibly to buy a hard asset with it. If you're using it just to like get by, that starts getting into like risky business, right? Because when people talk about debt slavery, OK, when you use a Bitcoin backed loan, you are never a slave to that debt.

You own that Bitcoin. To settle that loan, you just have to sell a fraction of it. You don't have to work forever to pay our loan. You already earned that, right? We're not trying to create debt slaves here. That's not the point, right? Debt slaves is you maxed out your credit card and you got fired and now you have unsecured credit and now you have somebody suing you and you have to keep working to keep figuring out how to pay this person, right? That's creating debt slaves.

When you're using the asset as the anchor of the loan, by definition, that person already owns that. He's just trying to get an advance on a tax-efficient way of something they don't want to sell today. Right. So debt is not this uniform, monolithic idea. Yeah, it's very different depending on the use case and the situation, for sure. There's incredible amounts of nuance in it. And if you don't take the time to understand and just blanket all debt is bad, you're leaving yourself without... And that's also something that a lot of Bitcoiners do. Correct.

They talk about the fiat system in such a general way. And I understand there are some people that are saying, you know, I had a debate with Jimmy Song in El Salvador about debt. And this was this was about a year and change. I remember it was on stage. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm at the argument that I made the argument that if if that is a voluntary transaction between two individuals, the consent to this transaction. And I see something in the market and I want to take a view. I want to express a view on something I believe is going to happen. I'm a grown-up person.

I can accept that I was wrong. I can accept the loss of having been wrong. But if I think that you as a government are going to debase my currency and you won't be able to print this Bitcoin, and I so desire to borrow dollars to buy that Bitcoin, why should I not be able to? Right. Like, why should I not be able to?

Yeah, that was a good claim. And then Jimmy was saying that debt in general is just immoral. So that's a blanket. That's what I mean. So, yeah, I mean, you may take that stance and that's a perfectly fine stance to have. But my experience in my 41 years that I've lived in this fiat life and what I've seen with my two eyes has led me to believe that if you can use that responsibly, you can get ahead faster. Right. And I've done this.

I've seen people do it. I have a business. I do this for a living. Right. And I have seen what it can do. I've had people call me and I've had people come to me in private to tell me, thanks to your loan, I was able to buy my house and not sell my Bitcoin. Thanks to your loan, I was able to buy more Bitcoin and I doubled my stack. So I think, like I said, I've seen what it can do when you use it right.

And this is why I want to, my mission, my mission, my. Your wish. My wish is like, listen, I'm going to give you the I'm going to paint you the world as I see it. I'm going to tell you what the benefits are and what the potential risks are. Yeah. And you can make a call. Right. If you if you if if it clicks for you and you want to do it, fine. If it doesn't click for you and you don't want to do it, that's also fine. But my thesis is that as more people understand the dynamics between fiat and hard assets,

you're going to inevitably reach that conclusion or a very similar conclusion which is borrowing a currency that somebody can print and they're printing 10 more of it every year and using that to buy something that can never get printed actually pretty good idea right um if you size it right yes and so at its core that's what this is yes so pretty simple and if i just to um maybe before we wrap up go back to venezuela yeah so when did you leave venezuela so my last trip in person was 2016 but you have lived there until 2016 or you left earlier no so my family so i grew up in venezuela um i left uh i came to canada for the first time in 2003 uh-huh but back then i was still going back to venezuela like twice a year i would spend summers there and i was i was

but I was always there when I wasn't in school. So I was basically, I came to Canada for university. So seeing Venezuela throughout the years from the 2000s till now, has it deteriorated so much that it became unbearable for people to live in it, you know, with dignity? To till last, I mean, the last incident that we've seen? Yes, so Venezuela,

So what it looks like is, so you remember, you know, you probably have some image from your childhood of your hometown and the way your block looked and the color of the houses and the shopping centers and all the things you did as a kid. And when you go back to your town today, none of that is there, right? Everything's different. The houses are bigger. Venezuela, nothing has changed. Venezuela, it's like it was frozen in time. so like the the cars that are driving around are like from the late 90s because that was the last economic boom so the majority of the cars are still late 90s cars the houses are still the

same color the skylines are identical there's no new buildings no progress so it's it's like you're stuck in this place where time just doesn't go doesn't happen and it's it's it also starts messing with people's minds because after a while you stop believing in your ability to escape or to get out or you just kind of come to accept things yeah and you just people are just like down and they're not they're just numb yeah they're like people are like their spark they've lost their hope and and then the other really weird thing is you start seeing people understand that really the only way to get ahead is to become part of the system right become a government vendor become a government contractor and a lot of people a lot of people have flexible morals

so that's a that's a nice definition what flexible morals when faced with that decision and they will start creating excuses as to well if i don't do it someone else will do it and and then they start bending into the and then all of a sudden you become what you hated the most yes and i've seen that happen many times i will close on an optimistic note which is that changed january 3rd no longer is the government or the regime the all-powerful almighty that you feared before they are very clearly on their way out and they are very clearly under the boot of the U.S. government. I think it's still a little bit too early for me to say it's fixed, it's done, let's go.

But the things that I've seen recently since Jan 3rd are things that I have not seen in 25 years. The fact that you have Delsis Rodriguez coming out and speaking against the assassination attempt at Mr. Trump and we uh i forget the words but basically they're like we reject and sort of you know we we reject and disapprove of the attempts on the president the life of the united states president this is the same person that took out your right hand person and took him to j donald trump is the same guy that took out maduro under their nose on jan 3rd that was delce's boss in six weeks we've gone to Delcy's boss saying don't shoot the guy that basically dismantled my governmental party that's a clear indication of who's it could not be right now it could not be more yes and so I

believe does that make you optimistic yes it makes me very optimistic I've already started fielding calls from investors random investors calling me saying now I'm going to Caracas can you connect me with some people wow wow i'm looking at property in margarita can you connect me with some people and like i said these are american airlines has one daily flight going to two daily flights in a few weeks to caracas copa airlines has launched flights to different smaller regional house barquisimeto my hometown finally has an international flight again then barquisimeto's international airport where i'm from hasn't had an international flight for decades we now have an international flight back to Orquistimato and so again the pieces are falling into place

yes and I am very optimistic that the country is going to find its way back to democracy that's my hope I'll do whatever it's in my power to help that and you know I think Venezuela deserves this the Venezuelan people have been through way too much and we're great people where Venezuelans are incredibly hardworking resilient smart people and we just haven't had the chance to show what we can do and i think that if we if we can incorporate them back into the productive free world the world will be a better place and i i'm i'm really happy and excited to see this wave of change that was not in my bingo card i did not expect minister to ever turn around but it's here and i want to make the most of it and i'm sure you're happy about that i'm very happy you know

what i really want to dive deeper to this with you uh unfortunately they're turning off the lights but i do i want i want to do uh another another talk and dive deeper because i do have a lot of follow-up questions to that and i want to i want to hear more the this is fascinating for me me. Anytime. So let's do it again. Sure. All right.

Great. And just to bring us back to this reality here in Vegas, what are you foreseeing that is going to come out of this show? Do you think we're going to hear anything interesting in the next couple of days? I'm hoping some pardons, some open source pardons, we don't know. It's on everyone's mind. a few government people coming i think there's there's a lot at stake right now in on the hill and so i think regulatory updates would be welcome and other than that i just think you know getting

a general vibe check for the for the industry right i think the market started the year off with like a big correction and that sort of you know they took the win out of the sales like engagement and crypto twitter has been down and like the mood has been kind of hostile but i i think coming here you you're really starting to get a sense of like we found our footing again and we seem to be rat like ready to basically rally back and then the sense i'm getting is is very much like we're gonna go up from here like i i don't i don't see anybody here looking down and talking about 50 or 40k yeah and so that makes it for luke roman well right but he's not here i think but i i think it's it's it's it's obviously like government's related right

like pardons legislative legislative updates there's going to be some product announcements iran accepting bitcoin for uh right right like all these surprising things that are happening so i mean there's usually one or two big product announcements that come out of these i don't know i don't have any insight baseball on those but we'll see what happens awesome where should people follow you so laden is at hodl with laden on x and laden.io is our website my name or my uh x So Twitter is Cryptonomist with an A at the end, Cryptonomista. And you just Google Mauricio Leran, and you'll probably get my ex. You'll get the right person, and you'll get the link to Leran on the show notes.

Use my link over there, and feel free to contact the Leran team with any question, for sure. Yeah, DMs are always open. Awesome. So yeah, we're easy to get a hold of. I love talking to you, Mau. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll do it again for sure. My pleasure, Fat.

I'm looking forward to it. Cool. Thank you. Thanks for being with us. Please take a minute to give this episode a like, a comment, and subscribe or follow. And please share it with your friends so they can also get value and choose to take some positive action in their lives. Till next time!