Crypto Biz: From shorting the Venezuelan Bolivar to shorting the US dollar

When Venezuela was experiencing hyperinflation, Ledn co-founder Mauricio di Bartolomeo hedged against the collapsing local currency by shorting it in favor of the more stable US dollar. Today, he’s using a similar strategy — this time borrowing against his Bitcoin (BTC) to hedge against the crumbling US dollar.

Di Bartolomeo connected with me during Canada Crypto Week in Toronto, where he talked about the advantages of Bitcoin-backed loans and the rapid growth of collateralized BTC lending. In our interview, he made a compelling case for continuing to stack sats, even as Bitcoin’s price keeps rising.

This week’s Crypto Biz dives into our conversation with the Ledn co-founder and covers the latest business news from the blockchain world.

Before Bitcoin, di Bartolomeo’s most successful investment was shorting the Bolivar with US dollars, referring to his experience in Venezuela during the hyperinflationary 2010s. 

“I was borrowing Bolivars and buying dollars with them, holding the hard dollars and having a borrow [position] on the weaker currency,” he said.

He then founded Ledn, a company that lets Bitcoin investors access dollar liquidity without parting ways with their BTC. 

By borrowing against Bitcoin, “you’re basically doing the same thing, but you are in effect holding the hard money, which is Bitcoin, and taking a borrow [position] on dollars, which is a weaker currency,” he said.

Many Bitcoiners have found this to be a winning strategy. By the end of Q4, Ledn’s loan book value was valued at $9.9 billion, according to Galaxy Research.

Banco Industrial, Guatemala’s largest bank, has integrated crypto infrastructure SukuPay into its mobile banking app, enabling users to receive US dollars more easily.

SukuPay said this integration is the first time a major Latin American retail bank has used a crypto-native protocol for its payment services.

Banco Industrial has more than 1,600 service locations across Guatemala and has also expanded into neighboring countries. 

The “key to mainstream adoption of blockchain technology is making it invisible to the end-user,” SukuPay CEO Yonathan Lapchik told Cointelegraph. 

With SukuPay’s technology, Banco Industrial app users can receive dollars from the US for a flat fee of $0.99, significantly lower than the typical 6% to 10% they currently pay, said Lapchik.

America’s banking lobby sees yield-bearing stablecoins as a threat to its business model, which relies on taking deposits, paying depositors minimal interest and using those funds for higher-risk investments, according to NYU professor Austin Campbell.

In a May 21 social media post, Campbell claimed that he’s heard rumblings of “panic” over new stablecoins offering holders interest payments and other monetary rewards. 

He told Democratic lawmakers that “banks want you to protect their cartel so they can keep screwing your voters.”

Although Campbell didn’t mention any stablecoin assets by name, Cointelegraph reported in February that the Securities and Exchange Commission approved the country’s first yield-bearing stablecoin security by Figure Markets. At the time of its launch, the YLDS stablecoin offered a yield of 3.85%.

Pi Protocol and Spark Protocol have also developed interest-bearing tokens. 

With Bitcoin back above $100,000, Michael Saylor’s business intelligence firm, Strategy, has resumed its buying spree by acquiring 7,390 BTC last week for approximately $765 million.

The latest purchase brings Strategy’s total Bitcoin holdings to 576,230 BTC, with an unrealized gain of around $20 billion.

The announcement came just two days before Bitcoin surged past its previous all-time high, climbing above $109,000 for the first time since January. Like other risk assets, Bitcoin has benefited from improved investor sentiment following the suspension of tariff hostilities between the United States and China.

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