‘Crecimiento’ Movement Seeks To Make Argentina A Crypto Hub

Argentina’s crypto community is seeing president Javier Milei’s bull in a china shop approach to reform as a once-in-a-generation opportunity.

Enter the Crecimiento movement, which has united Argentina’s crypto pioneers and global players behind a shared vision of turning the country into a hub for crypto innovation. The movement has amassed a community of 1,500 strong, both locals and gringos alike, on Telegram.

Mile Whilei has never fully articulated his views or intentions towards cryptocurrency, his ethos – broadly aligned with that of crypto – along with other macroeconomic factors have created an Overton window for novel solutions.

The idea is to fuse Argentina’s unique combination of homegrown crypto talent, innovation by necessity and a political window afforded by Milei to create an environment for incubating blockchain startups and solutions. Ideally, these innovations will help to overcome nearly 70 years of economic and monetary policy failures.

“The end goal of Crecimiento is to transform our country into a crypto and blockchain country, attract capital, and attract talent to add on to the talent that we already have,” Diego Fernandez, Secretary of Innovation and Digital Transformation for the city of Buenos Aires, said in an interview.

Argentina is already known as a global hotspot for crypto adoption, particularly stablecoins. The country placed 15th in the Chainalysis 2024 Geography of Cryptocurrency Index – widely regarded as the gold standard on such matters.

Triple digit inflation and currency controls have forced people to find alternative means of storing value and transacting.

“It’s not only that we can’t rely on our own currency, it’s that we’re legally blocked from relying on other ones,” said Mili Santamaria, a crypto attorney now working with the Crecimiento core team.

Crecimiento aims to tackle these problems at the technological level. The movement kicked into high gear in August with Aleph, a month-long “pop up city” that convened more than two thousand builders, investors, mentors and enthusiasts in Buenos Aires with the goal of incubating startups and solutions. Blue chip industry names like Avalanche
Avalanche
ZKsync
ZKsync
brine
Solanum
Worldcoin
Worldcoin
Polygon
Polygon
and IPFS and Filecoin
Filecoin
founder Juan Benet – Monday up financial support for the initiative. My employer Filecoin Foundation was a sponsor of the Aleph hackathon.

The Aleph city has created a physical manifestation of the digitally native Crecimiento community. At its facility in the Palermo neighborhood one finds a large co-work space offering daily programming, workshops and hackathons, as well as yoga, meditation, football tournaments and other leisure activities.

68 startups are now heads-down working on unsexy yet actionable solutions such as payment rails, new stablecoin models, privacy features, and RWA tokenization that could one day rewire Argentina’s financial plumbing.

But impacting Argentina’s trajectory for the better will require more than just attracting talent and generating buzz. As such, a core goal of Crecimiento is to ensure sustainable growth opportunities by improving Argentina’s shaky business and regulatory climate.

“We’re very volatile not just in terms of currency but also on the regulatory and tax front,” said Santamaria in an interview, emphasizing that the goal is not just to spin up promising crypto startups, but to make sure that they don’ t leave.

She has been leading an effort to identify pain points for startups and address them through the public policy process. Solutions like special economic zones, special tax zones and regulatory sandboxes, could — if successfully implemented — provide the clarity needed for the local startup scene to thrive.

“We have the local talent, but we need better regulations to achieve our dream of having Argentina and Buenos Aires as one of the capitals, or the capital, of the crypto industry.”

Disclosure: Filecoin Foundation, one of the many organizations supporting Crecimiento, is my employer.