This article was originally published on October 16, 2024 in Revista Anfibia. Cover art by Sebastián Angresano Around 8 p.m.
, the streets of the town of San Pedro were empty. At the soccer clubs, games and practices come to an untimely halt. Conversations are interrupted.
About a third of the inhabitants receive an alert on their cell phones and have barely 40 minutes to act. When customers reappeared at the store at 600 Molina St., a few blocks from the bus terminal, Claudio Núñez greeted them with a sarcastic laugh and a question: “Did you ‘trade’ already? Claudio, 52 years old, laughs, but he also traded, as did his wife, Alejandra Lobianco.
They both learned to use the word in a different way just a few months ago, but the grocery store owner and the auto mechanic already look like born market traders: they bought and sold cryptocurrencies in minutes, in an app on their cell phones. Or so they thought. They each invested US$200, which they will probably never see again.
*** Between 12,000 and 20,000 people from San Pedro, a large town in the Buenos Aires province where the last census counted almost 70,000 inhabitants, joined RainbowEx, a supposed crypto trading platform that promised an extraordinary profit in dollars of between 1 and 2% per day. That means an annual interest rate of 3,490%. Managed by a foundation called Knight Consortium, the company would send a nightly “signal” via the Telegram messaging service indicating which cryptocurrency was wor.
