Argentina - Neuquen is hosting Mallers' Strike and a Lightning Wallet experiment
Back in mid-January, Strike’s Jack Mallers said that his lightning wallet app would drop into Argentina. Strike wants to deploy the wallet with Tether stablecoins (USDT) not Bitcoin.
That’s interesting, since presumably Alberto Fernandez and CFK would be allergic to treasuring Bitcoin at the Central Bank. But there’s something else interesting here:
San Martín de los Andes, a small town in Neuquen province, is ground zero for Argentina’s Bitcoin payments experiment.
The province where Strike chose to set up its pilot is not the capital of Buenos Aires and suggests this pilot falls within a body of federal law that lets governor Omar Gutierrez host Strike regardless of what the central government in the capital Buenos Aires says.
Oddly, the reaction in Argentina seems muted. It didn’t make local coverage of Neuquen’s newspaper. And Guttierez - unlike Bukele - did not play host to the deployment. And now, after two weeks, the news doesn’t seem to have become weaponized by Alberto and CFK.
That doesn’t mean Mallers is not being accommodated behind the scenes. He probably is. I think it’s likely a matter of time before that accommodation is met with the political realities of the Peronists and their attachment to capital controls. After all, the Lightning Network threatens them.