The 28-year-old American Behind Argentina President Javier Milei's Crypto Scandal

Hayden Davis has had a career trajectory most 28-year-olds could only dream of — going from flipping Oreos in the pandemic to selling the most up-and-coming President in Latin America on memecoins.

There's only one problem: His latest memecoin, LIBRA, pumped and dumped and embroiled Argentina's President Javier Milei in a crypto scandal that has him facing calls of impeachment and fraud allegations.

It's a pretty staggering climb to infamousness for Davis, who was a relatively unheard of Liberty University graduate before LIBRA attracted so much attention and he started making the rounds in damage control interviews that may have just created more legal problems for himself.

Here's the wild story of President Javier Milei getting sucked into an obvious front-ran token launch, the incredible fallout, and 28-year-old Hayden Davis, who is now left stumbling in interviews when asked what he plans to do with the nearly $100 million the token brought in.

The Beginning of LIBRA

I was down in Buenos Aires when all of this began. It was October of 2024, when the crypto world descended on Argentina with a few crypto conferences. One of those conferences, the Tech Forum, was put on by two argentine crypto promoters, Mauricio Novelli and Manuel Terrones Godoy. According to multiple conference attendees, organizers at one point courted big name guests to pay for roundtable access with President Javier Milei. Cadano founder Charles Hoskinson spoke openly about refusing to pay to meet with the President.

"We had all these people we'd encounter along the way and they'd say, 'If you give us a little something, something we can get you a meeting and magical things can happen,'" he said. "We were always curious what was going on there."

In that setting, enter Hayden Davis, the 28-year-old CEO of crypto venture firm Kelsier Ventures, who comes to work with President Javier Milei as a crypto advisor (his claim in that role was later refuted by the Argentine government.) Eventually, Davis worked to spin up the Viva La Libertad project and the LIBRA token, which purported to raise money for Argentine businesses. The project's site launched on February 14 and immediately left the world scrambling after President Javier Milei promoted it on X in a now deleted tweet. The site looked rushed — it lacked tokenomics details, it was in English, and had a Google form as the contact page.

Despite that, the token shot up immediately, and crashed 95% in just a few hours. As the token declined, Milei deleted his initial tweet, saying he wasn't sure of all the details behind the project.

In the aftermath, Hayden Davis surfaced on X to share an emergency update, saying he wanted to be transparent and accountable for what happened. In that endeavor, Davis then delivered the goods — and then some. Not only did he admit to nefarious dealings with the launch of LIBRA, he also revealed himself to be part of the team that launched Melania Trump's MELANIA token in an interview with crypto crime YouTuber Coffeezilla.

"It is an insider's game, this is an unregulated casino," Davis said as he described the inner-workings of token launches. "All of these are a game, and so from a retail perspective ... it's not a good idea." He went on to explain why he's not directly at fault for the LIBRA token collapse, blaming other "snipers" or front-runners who buy the token in massive quantities directly after launch. (To prevent that, he mentioned the team that launched MELANIA's token even did this with their own token, which as some speculated, may or may not trigger follow up investigations around potential market manipulation charges.)

Regardless, it might be the most damning admission from Davis — because what you have is a guy who was fully aware of how bad this token launch could go — because he saw that up close with the MELANIA token launch, and despite that, leveraged the President of Argentina to promote a project on the promise of helping Argentine businesses when they are probably going to be the ones who are hurt the most in all of this.

Hayden Davis did not respond to a request for an interview. In an appearance with Barstool Founder Dave Portnoy, who is sponsored by Kraken, (which coincidentally has been among the most memecoin-focused exchanges) Davis struggled to answer who actually owns the $100 million raised from the token launch. In a stumbling response, Davis said, "I don't know. It's not mine, it's definitely Argentina's. Milei's team? Who I thought was Milei's team." It's worth noting that Portnoy allegedly received a LIBRA token allocation he received and returned after failing to agree to promotional terms. After buying and losing millions of dollars on LIBRA tokens himself, Portnoy was reimbursed by Davis for his losses. Portnoy posted about this exchange and discussed it on his livestream, saying "that's the advantage of being me."

It's unclear how this all plays out now, especially considering Davis himself claimed to be an advisor to Milei, which Milei's team later refuted. For President Milei, he now faces allegations of fraud, and investigation, and the embarrassment of at least trusting the wrong team. In his first interview since the scandal, he explained deleting his tweet, and defended wanting to support the projects for what he believed was a good faith effort to use technology to help people.

As a tech enthusiast, Milei said he wanted to use this as an opportunity to continue Argentina's transformation into a tech hub. It's likely that in the aftermath of the LIBRA scandal, crypto will have a higher hill to climb there now. Milei now has little margin for error as he enters a crucial few weeks in which he was supposed to head to America to garner support for a new deal with the International Monetary Fund.

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