The Ethereum world fair started this week in La Rural and just two days after its start the vibration of the crypto ecosystem in the capital of Buenos Aires is already contagious. The fair, which will continue throughout the week, includes hundreds of events between panels, hackatonsrecreational activities, experiences and, today, the main stage was dedicated to Argentines, among which exhibitors such as Mercado Libre, Lemon, and even Claudio “Chiqui” Tapia stood out.
“It is a before and after, not only for the economy of the clubs, but for the appreciation of all the players”said Tapia, president of the AFA, in a Devconnect panel in which they highlighted that The AFA is the first federation to institutionalize the solution of tokenizing football players, offering this possibility to all Argentine football clubs and allowing anyone to be part of this financial product. This solution is made by WIN Investments, company that was born four years ago and today has investors in 40 countries around the world and more than 140 tokenized players (among whom is Lionel Messi).
What does your model consist of? The clubs that train the athletes receive part of the money from the sale when they are transferred to other clubs. This contract is known as a solidarity mechanism and is what is tokenized from WIN (digitally represented on the blockchain).
The money that reaches the training club through these agreements sometimes takes five, eight or ten years. By tokenizing it, The club receives immediate liquidity to support infrastructure or finance players.
The investor, who can be anyone, acquires a token that represents a digital stake in a fraction of the training rights that the training club owns over a player. In this way, when a player is transferred to another club, Token owners receive their profit according to the number of tokens they own and the value of the player’s transfer.
“We came to make history in world sport. Nobody could be an investor in the transfer market; we managed to democratize investment in the most popular sport in the world, “which is football, and starting with this first product, which is the transfer market, the biggest business that football has,” said Valentín Jaremtchuk, co-founder of Win Investments, who also participated in the panel. Indeed, this model allows small investors to participate in the lucrative transfer market, previously reserved for large clubs, agents and private funds.
Jaremtchuk also detailed that They have just closed the tokenization agreement with the Uruguayan Football Federation. And also They entered into an alliance with the Argentine Olympic Committee, to allow Argentine athletes to participate in tokenization and obtain financing to reach the next edition of this competition that will take place in Los Angeles in 2028.
On the other hand, the exchange With more than 5 million users in the region and leader in Argentina, it was not far behind and also gave important news on this day of Devconnect: Lemon announced its “mini apps” program, a project that seeks to give possibilities to startups and entrepreneurs to develop their own applications, directly within Lemon. In this way, they will have exposure to the millions of users that the wallet has and the possibility of accessing 38 tokens within these networks. Additionally, all Lemon users went through the KYC process, thus ensuring that they are real people and not bots. They also have legal support, a guarantee of safe custody (since they have a PSAV license in Argentina), among other advantages.
This unit within Lemon will begin with seven mini apps, among which is Berry – which allows you to invest in the United States stock market using digital dollars and tokenized stocks – or Real Blocks, startup which tokenizes real-world assets.
“Lemon is no longer just an app: it is an open platform to develop the future of the internet. Starting today we open our infrastructure so that Argentines can access financial products from all over the world,” said Marcelo Cavazzoli, Founder and CEO of Lemon, who was on a panel giving the announcements.
Eduardo Elsztain, president of IRSA, joins the world of tokenization, led by BoulderLam. This is an alliance that connects the companies BoulderTech (specialized in tokenization of real assets (RWA), which has the IRSA group as the main investor) and Lambda, a company specialized in distributed systems, cryptography and blockchain. They search develop an infrastructure that allows companies and institutions in Latin America to access the Ethereum ecosystem in a secure, scalable manner and in accordance with regulatory standards.
“Our idea is to make a Joint Venture where We bring together all the capabilities that BoulderTech has (both tokenization, to commercial capabilities), the IRSA strategic group, which is our main investor, and the technology that Lambda Class is developing, so that, among all to be able to come out with a much more complete range to the market, which is no longer just tokenization of real world assetsbut other things,” explained Rodrigo Benzanquén, CEO of BoulderLam, to LA NACION and detailed one of his future projects: are tokenizing a SHEFA investment fund – a corporate venture capital (CVC) launched by IRSA- in which now anyone can be an investor, from 10,000 in crypto dollars (USDT). They detail that the project will be launched this week.
Mercado Libre, the firm founded by Marcos Galperin also had a place on stage today and said that their interest in the crypto world had always existed, to the point that they created their own token/cryptocurrency at one point called “meli coin.” “We had a lot of fun with the project, but regulatory terms it was very difficult. We couldn’t go out on the field with that product. and, in fact, it is one of the few products in the history of the company that never saw the light of day,” said Daniel Rabinovich, COO of MercadoLibre.
After that bad experience, they decided to create a stablecoincalled “meli dollar”. “This was a little over two years ago. “Meli dollar is not much for now, but it is a currency that is attached to the dollar, which works in Brazil and Mexico”Rabinovich added.
When asked for his opinion on the crypto world, he pointed out that he still does not perceive that Web3 has provided much mass-level added value to the user. “Many years later, it is difficult for me to see the impact at a general level. More and more people do not custody their crypto, they leave there and ask for custody, it becomes centralized. I also think that, for general users, that thing about emancipation, about being free, didn’t happen that much.”, he opined.
Finally, highlighted the strong impact that the union of artificial intelligence with the crypto ecosystem can have: “I think it’s a party; crypto has managed to survive two very strong things: it is a very solid store of value and there are protocols so that your money is protected and safe. In addition, there is the ability to have access to the physical world. If on top of that you add AI, it can be the great mechanism to make the difficult things easy in the crypto industry.”
