It has been a year since Argentina's president Javier Milei supported a project that got hundreds of thousands of people around the world to invest in Libra, a memecoin that turned out to be a scam.
Alfonso Gamboa Silvestre, a 25-year-old from Chile, was one of many who lost a lot of money. When the token was launched and quickly disappeared, he lost 10,000 USD. After this, he chose to leave the crypto industry for good.
A presidential endorsement that started a buying frenzy
On Valentine's Day last year, Gamboa Silvestre was at his computer trading. The day was like any other until he received a message in one of his many crypto groups on Telegram.
He opened the message. It said something like: "Argentina's president has just launched a crypto token." Gamboa Silvestre went directly to X (formerly Twitter) to check if it was true.
At first, he thought Milei's account had been hacked. But after reading the president's verified tweet and the website for the "Viva La Libertad Project," he trusted the information.
He then bought the token. In total, he invested 5,000 USD.
"I made two purchases. First a smaller one. When I felt completely sure it was [Milei's] tweet, I made a larger one," Gamboa Silvestre told BeInCrypto during an interview in Spanish.
Afterwards, Gamboa Silvestre went out to have dinner with his family, but he couldn't take his eyes off his phone. Libra's price was constantly dropping and he didn't know what to do.
It was difficult to choose food from the menu while also avoiding his family's worried glances. Therefore, he locked himself in the restaurant's restroom.
"At first, I thought the token would go down and then rise to infinity," said Gamboa Silvestre. "But that didn't happen. I saw it drop more and more, and my fourteenth of February became a nightmare."
When investors started withdrawing their money on a large scale, Gamboa Silvestre did the same. He lost twice as much as he had initially bet.
This event made him permanently leave the crypto world.
From active trader to completely out.
Gamboa Silvestre started with crypto in 2016, mostly out of curiosity. But in 2022, he took it seriously and became an active trader.
The memecoin sector gave him profits at the start.
Gamboa Silvestre was one of the first investors in TRUMP and MELANIA, which Donald Trump and Melania Trump launched less than 48 hours before Trump became president of the USA.
He earned well from it and believed that Libra would yield the same results.
"I thought, since Milei had meetings with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, that this would go the same way, that they would do the right thing and that I could make money from it," recalls Gamboa Silvestre.
But that didn't happen. Besides the money, Gamboa Silvestre lost something even more important – the love for crypto.
"After what happened with Libra, I completely stopped with crypto. I quit something I really liked, which had given me a lot of profit in the meantime. In the future, I saw myself living off it. But I lost all trust."
Today, Gamboa Silvestre only has contact with the industry through a class action lawsuit against Milei.
The facts contradict Milei's claims.
Gamboa Silvestre is one of 212 investors seeking compensation for their losses in a lawsuit in Argentina.
Even though Milei has downplayed the impact that LIBRA has had on investors several times, the facts tell a different story.
According to data from Ripio, which is a centralized player in the country, 1,329 people lost money. These figures directly contradict Milei's earlier claims that only a few Argentine investors were affected.
Argentinians were not the only ones who lost money. Investors from Bosnia to Lebanon and Australia were also affected, showing that the impact was global.
In the USA, a separate class action lawsuit is underway against Hayden Davis, an American investor and CEO of Kelsier Ventures. He has been accused of being the mastermind behind the project.
Trust is decreasing as the investigation continues.
Despite it being a year since Libra launched, Milei still hasn't given a clear explanation of how involved he was in the token project.
According to Agustín Rombolá, one of the lawyers representing the complainants in the class action lawsuit, Milei's responses have varied greatly throughout the year.
"At first, he said it was a casino — that you don't cry in a casino. Then he said he had the right to sell his opinions. After that, he said he wasn't president when he wrote the tweet. Later, he said he had been tricked," Rombolá told BeInCrypto.
According to congressman Maximiliano Ferraro, one of the clearest critics in the Libra scandal, Milei still hasn't addressed an important question about his role in the case.
"There are still many unanswered questions. Who contacted the president and how did he get the [smartcontract-address] that had more than 40 characters and was not public?" Ferraro said in an interview in Spanish.
While the investigation continues, they are still figuring out the financial losses and how much trust has decreased.
For Gamboa Silvestre and thousands of others, Libra was not just a failed investment, but also a turning point that completely changed their view of crypto.