Bitcoin Regains $37,000 As Argentina Elects Pro-Bitcoin President

On Sun­day, the Lib­er­tar­i­an Par­ty’s Javier Milei was elect­ed as the new pres­i­dent of Argenti­na. Milei has spo­ken pos­i­tive­ly about bit­coin in the past, and the price of the cryp­to asset rose to rough­ly $37,500 as Milei’s oppo­nent in the runoff elec­tion con­ced­ed defeat. 

Milei Has Embraced Bitcoin But Has No Policy Outlined

Lib­er­tar­i­an Javier Milei defeat­ed fel­low con­tender Ser­gio Mas­sa in the runoff elec­tion for the pres­i­dent of Argenti­na on Sun­day, with Milei receiv­ing near­ly 56% of the final vote tally. 

The elec­tion result was viewed pos­i­tive­ly by bit­coin pro­po­nents around the world, as Milei has spo­ken sup­por­t­ive­ly about the cryp­to asset in the past. Ear­li­er this year, Milei referred to bit­coin as a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the “return of mon­ey to its orig­i­nal cre­ator, the pri­vate sector.”

Milei has already drawn com­par­isons to the heav­i­ly pro-bit­coin pres­i­dent of El Sal­vador, Nay­ib Bukele, who declared bit­coin legal ten­der in his coun­try. How­ev­er, the new pres­i­dent-elect of Argenti­na has not yet out­lined a spe­cif­ic bit­coin pol­i­cy for the country. 

That said, Milei has promised to close the Cen­tral Bank of Argenti­na and embrace the dol­lar­iza­tion of the Argen­tine econ­o­my. Argenti­na has a long his­to­ry of dif­fi­cul­ties with infla­tion, and the coun­try has recent­ly been strug­gling with an infla­tion rate of more than 100%.

“Ulti­mate­ly, Grayscale Research views this as a mean­ing­ful step for­ward for cryp­to adop­tion, as bit­coin moves clos­er toward ful­fill­ing its role as a super-sov­er­eign means of exchange to accel­er­ate a more acces­si­ble and inclu­sive finan­cial sys­tem,” wrote cryp­to asset man­ag­er Grayscale’s Matt Max­i­mo regard­ing the poten­tial impact of Milei’s victory.

Bitcoin Gathering Political Currency

Milei is yet anoth­er exam­ple of bit­coin becom­ing a larg­er talk­ing point in the glob­al polit­i­cal landscape. 

In the Unit­ed States, inde­pen­dent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made his first offi­cial appear­ance as a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date at a bit­coin con­fer­ence ear­li­er this year. Addi­tion­al­ly, the cur­rent may­ors of both New York City and Mia­mi have talked about turn­ing their respec­tive cities into cryp­to hubs.

That said, there are also oppo­nents of cryp­to in the U.S., most notably Mass­a­chu­setts Sen­a­tor Eliz­a­beth War­ren, who has embraced the idea of build­ing an “anti-cryp­to army” in Washington.

In the past, Venezuela, which has been deal­ing with much worse lev­els of infla­tion than Argenti­na, attempt­ed to cre­ate its own cryp­to token. How­ev­er, Venezue­la’s cryp­to project, known as the Petro, was large­ly cen­tral­ized, work­ing much dif­fer­ent­ly from bit­coin and failed in achiev­ing what it set out to do.