One year has passed since Argentine President Javier Milei backed a project that drove hundreds of thousands of people worldwide to invest in Libra, a meme coin that turned out to be a rug pull.
Alfonso Gamboa Silvestre, a 25-year-old from Chile, was among the many traders who suffered steep losses. The token’s launch and swift demise cost him $10,000. Since that moment, he has left the crypto industry for good.
A Presidential Endorsement That Drove a Buying Frenzy
On Valentine’s Day last year, Gamboa Silvestre was trading on his computer. The day seemed normal until a notification popped up on his phone from one of the many crypto groups he had on Telegram.
He opened the message, which read something along the lines of “Argentina’s president just launched a crypto token.” Gamboa Silvestre ran to X (formerly Twitter) to see whether it was true.
At first, he thought Milei’s account had been hacked. But after carefully reading the president’s verified tweet and the “Viva La Libertad Project” website he included, Gamboa Silvestre ruled out the possibility.
So he bought the token. In total, he invested $5,000.
“I made two purchases. First, a smaller one. When I was totally sure it was [Milei’s] tweet, I made a bigger one,” Gamboa Silvestre told BeInCrypto in an interview in Spanish.
After that, Gamboa Silvestre left the house to go out to dinner with his family, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off his phone. Libra’s price kept dropping, and he didn’t know what to do.
Choosing what looked best on the menu and averting his family’s worried gaze was hard enough, so he locked himself in the restaurant’s bathroom.
“At first I thought the token was going to go down, and then it was going to go back up to infinity,” Gamboa Silvestre said. “But that didn’t happen. I saw that it was going down and down, and my February 14th ended up being a nightmare.”
As investors began withdrawing their money en masse, so did Gamboa Silvestre. He ended up doubling his original investment in losses.
The event also marked his permanent exit from the crypto ecosystem.
From Active Trader To Complete Exit
Gamboa Silvestre first ventured into crypto in 2016, mostly out of curiosity. However, he began to take it seriously in 2022 and became an active trader.
The meme coin sector had treated him well at first.
Gamboa Silvestre was among the first investors in TRUMP and MELANIA, the two tokens launched by US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump less than 48 hours before Trump assumed the presidency.
He fared well for himself, and he believed that the story would be similar with Libra.
“I thought that, since Milei had been having different meetings with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, I said, well, this is going down the same path, they’re going to do things right, and I’m going to be able to make money with that,” Gamboa Silvestre recalled.
But things didn’t turn out that way. Besides the money he lost, Gamboa Silvestre surrendered something that was even more important to him: his love for crypto.
“After what happened with Libra, I completely stepped away from that world. I stopped doing something that I really liked that had generated me a lot of profitability during that period,” he said. “In the future, I saw myself only living from that. But I lost all confidence.”
Today, the only ties that Gamboa Silvestre has left to the industry are his participation in a class action brought against Milei.
Data Disputes Milei’s Claims
Gamboa Silvestre is one of 212 investors seeking reparation for their losses in a lawsuit pending in Argentina.
Even though Milei has repeatedly dialled down the impact that LIBRA had on investors, the facts tell a different story.
According to data from Ripio, just one centralized exchange operating in the country, 1,329 citizens lost money. These numbers directly contradicted Milei’s previous claims that only a handful of Argentine investors had been affected.
Argentines weren’t the only ones who had lost money. The impact was international, affecting investors anywhere from Bosnia to Lebanon to Australia.
In the United States, a separate class action lawsuit is moving forward against Hayden Davis, the American investor and CEO of Kelsier Ventures, who has been accused of being the mastermind behind the project.
Trust Erodes As Investigation Continues
Despite it being a year since Libra launched, Milei has yet to provide a coherent explanation of his level of involvement in the token project.
According to Agustín Rombolá, one of the lawyers representing the complainants in the class action, Milei’s answers have varied greatly over the past year.
“He first told us it was a casino, that you don’t cry in the casino. Then he told us that he had the right to sell his opinions. And then he told us that he was not working as the president at the moment of the tweet. [After that], he told us he was scammed,” Rombolá told BeInCrypto.
According to Congressman Maximiliano Ferraro, one of the most outspoken critics in the Libra scandal, Milei has yet to address a key issue regarding his role in the case.
“There are still many questions unanswered. Who approached the President, and how did they give him that [smart contract address] that had more than 40 characters and did not have a public status?” Ferraro said in an interview in Spanish.
As the investigation into what happened continues, the financial damage is still being tallied, as is the loss of trust.
For Gamboa Silvestre and thousands of others, Libra was not just a failed investment but a turning point that reshaped their relationship with crypto altogether.
The post Trader Leaves Crypto Permanently After Losing $10,000 to LIBRA appeared first on BeInCrypto.
