Behind-the-Scenes in Argentina’s Crypto Scene Now that the Aleph Pop-Up City is Over

No more than two dozen people are found in the hallways of Aleph’s co-working hub in the plush neighborhood of Palermo, Buenos Aires. It’s where much of a month-long crypto pop-up city took place, and where the magma of the Crecimiento movement flowed.

But during August, “el hub” was buzzing with energy.

Developers scurried across the sprawling 1,500 m2 floor, investors huddled around founders, private rooms for taking video calls and Zoom meetings were jam-packed, bean bags nestled tired organizers, and a Worldcoin orb ominously allured unsuspecting eyeballs in a corner.

In the week after, things have quieted down at Aleph. The Crecimiento core team is at a retreat in Mendoza, while many teams either flew home or are taking a few days off after the bustling month that just ended.

Aleph is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, a renowned Argentinian author. A phrase from it embellishes the main wall at the hub: “That point in space that contains all other points in space.” It alludes to what the organizers mean for this place to be: a place where anybody can converge, create, and construct.

And that’s what it became, for a month. Aleph citizens eagerly attended the hub every day of August, which made working at the co-working space almost impossible.

You’d see James Tunningley of Protocol Labs, one of Aleph’s main backers, sporting a navy blue jacket with a spattering of embroidered tags, plugged in his headphones and hunkered down–hopefully–to get some work done. Within seconds he’d be approached by an Aleph citizen thanking him for what the organization has done.

Emi, Mili, Mecha, and countless others of the Crecimiento organization would get assailed by attendees time and time again, thanking them for what could be an inflection point in the future of Argentina.

“It’s special because of the moment in time,” said Janine Leger, co-organizer of four other pop up cities, one of which dubbed Zuzalu that took place in Montenegro and had the presence of Vitalik Buterin. “Argentina has the opportunity to create a ripple effect that will shift laws around the world in terms of technology,” she told The Defiant.

Aleph built out an entire city within a city, trying to strike the right work-life balance, while also using crypto.

Run clubs, slow yoga, a wellness sanctuary and a padel court were also made available for the people who attended the city. Breath work, sound therapy, and a plethora of workshops about the future of work and governance were on the daily agenda. Two blocks from el hub, a hangar housed the main stage for talks about regulation, ZKproofs and DeFi.

To enter any one of the dozens of locations part of the Aleph city, attendees had to use a decentralized ID called QuarkID, which was developed in conjunction with the City of Buenos Aires government with the goal of allowing porteños to own their data.

While now mostly empty, the Aleph co-working hub which sits at the center of the broader Crecimiento movement, will remain open for the next two to three years, organizers say. The hope is that it will enable the next batch of billion-dollar crypto companies, Made in Argentina.

Builders Are Building

The pop-city was meant to be the seed. More than 350 builders from over 20 countries in 68 startups took part in the month-long experiment.

Projects spanned from decentralized IDs, to a blockchain-based DocuSign that aims to simplify identity (ValidAR, one of the three finalists of Aleph’s hackathon); Newtro, an artistic collective building an open-source UI framework to improve discoverability for artists; TornadoCodes, which offers a secure, address-free access-management solution for crypto transactions (the winner of the hackathon); Certo, which brings replicability to science by allowing for verifiable research; and ZingoLabs a safe-communication crypto wallet backed by ZK technology.

An Aleph community Wiki created by two founders who also presented on the final demo day with TinyCloud, an AI-powered DePIN project, has the deluge of data from the month-long pop-up city.

Many attendees are aiming to come back to the “Paris of Latin America.” The pseudonymous Za, of Zingo Labs, is planning to come back indefinitely and make the most of the coworking spot.

Like Za, there are dozens of other builders, investors, and enthusiasts – this writer included — that are staying behind or coming back, for the energy but also the potentially favorable regulations that might ensue.

The New “Casa Voltaire”

Between 2014 and 2016, a little-known crypto-bunker known as Casa Voltaire housed Argentina’s budding crypto community.

The unsuspecting abode on a sleepy street in downtown Palermo Hollywood is where it all began. Preceding Ethereum, and the vast majority of the most important projects in crypto alive today, the house quickly became a hotbed for the country’s builders to come together and discuss projects, business models, and the philosophical implications of an open and transparent system.

Kind of like Aleph.

From within those walls came some of Argentina’s largest projects today: cybersecurity firm OpenZepellin, the all-encompassing metaverse dubbed Decentraland, mobile wallet Muun, and a handful of other billion-dollar companies.

Some at Aleph hope to see that happen again.

“This is a Casa Voltaire on steroids,” Lautaro Sole, co-founder of Co Builders, an Argentine firm that offers engineering services to companies, said in an interview as the pop-city wound down. You could see Sole’s exhaustion and excitement from what had been a relentless month of building.

He told The Defiant that the industry will look back at Aleph as “the ignition” for what’s coming in the next few years in Argentina, and potentially the country. Many of the startups and projects that were present at Aleph, Sole thinks, will find funding, add developers to their teams, and likely “end up making a tangible impact.”

Sole made a notable comment that stuck: “I don’t think I heard anyone talk about the price of Bitcoin during the entire month.”

Sebastián Serrano, co-founder of Ripio, a firm with over 11 million customers across Latin America, sees something similar. He told The Defiant that Aleph reminds him of how past hotspots became “a hub of intense communities, all feeding off each other.”

“I feel the same energy, amazing things are going to come out of this,” he told The Defiant.

“This Is Just One Of a Kind”

Angela Ocando, core contributor at Web3Citizen, told The Defiant that the game changer has been to get off of social media, and interact with people in real life. “We’re so used to typing away on our computers, that collaborating in person is what’s making this experience amazing,” she said.

Her voice resonates with those of many others who flew into the country for the event.

“This is the best crypto experience I’ve ever lived through,” said Benjamín Gutiérrez, a former Lens Protocol developer from Chile who flew in for August. “Seeing developers, enthusiasts, and just the general vibe of people coming together is something I wish would happen more often,” he told The Defiant.

Two words tended to show up in nearly every conversation: “opportunity” and “incredible.”

Organizers are equally bullish.

Diego Fernández, head of innovation for the city of Buenos Aires and core member of Crecimiento told The Defiant that he has been to many crypto conferences around the world, but this one is something else.

“This is just one of a kind,” he said, pointing to the dozens of local businesses that have joined the month-long sandbox and which take crypto payments in the form of MORFI tokens. As the month neared its end, more than 2,100 transactions totaling hundreds of millions of Argentine pesos (ARS) had been processed, with a clear uptrend since the pop-up city began.

Argentina’s Perfect Storm

A country impacted by decades of economic decline, triple-digit inflation, and nearly 50% of citizens living under the poverty line plus the newly elected pro-business government of Javier Milei makes–unfortunately–for a perfect storm.

“The reality is that this technology is unstoppable–growing at an unprecedented rate–and as regulators we have to take our role seriously so we aren’t left behind,” said Daniel Vitolo, Argentina’s General Inspector of Justice, a top position in libertarian president Javier Milei’s central government. He reckoned that the “entire country will benefit” from having authorities come on board and build out the pro-crypto framework that the nation’s Crecimiento community is experimenting with.

Vitolo was present at Aleph’s regulation day along with several other authority figures who shared his view. One of his fellow regulators is the president of Argentina's SEC (the CNV), Roberto Silva.

Silva pointed out that the CNV sees the need to update the regime surrounding tokenization, in a bid to bring a variety of Real World Assets (RWAs) on chain.

Silva, the equivalent of Gary Gensler in the U.S., had words of calm to listeners who might be worried about the potential for excessive overreach from authorities.

“We will follow the law but we are also not going to overregulate the industry,” he said.

Milagros Santamaría, who leads the legal team for Crecimiento and recently attended the Argentine Congress to offer insights, told The Defiant that the focus is to bring in a diverse set of actors in the Argentine regulatory environment to help approach every aspect of the business process; from paperwork to tax implications.

“This isn’t a short-term effort, or something solely for Aleph, but really we are building with 30-40 years in mind,” Santamaría said.

Local organizers and builders are bullish on the regulatory framework being built. Marcelo Cavazzoli, founder of the country’s largest crypto wallet, Lemon, told The Defiant that Argentina “is going to experience a huge breakthrough,” the likes of something people haven’t seen before.

What Comes Next?

Besides the potential for successful startups there are other concrete outcomes from Crecimiento and Aleph.

Hanna Schiuma, CEO of Lend2b and part of the Crecimiento team, told The Defiant she wants to see three main outcomes: a fully operative regulatory sandbox, investments flowing into Argentina, and the nation positioning itself as a global tech hub.

Schiuma pointed out that Argentina is gaining momentum, and whatever comes next is thanks to “a very powerful entrepreneurial class,” along with the developer talent present.

She alluded to the overarching theme at Aleph as the main obstacle to tackle: transforming the regulatory and tax landscape to attract more capital. That will offer something that we don’t see very often, “being able to invest long term with stability in an unstable world,” she said.

Builders, journalists, investors, and enthusiasts are bullish on Argentina, mostly thanks to Aleph and what the Crecimiento organization put together. The nation, known for its asados, wine, and triple-digit inflation, is now becoming a true crypto country.