Source: Cointelegraph
Original: “Ledn Co-founder: ‘Before Investing in Bitcoin (BTC), My Most Successful Investment Was Shorting the Bolivar’”
Before discovering Bitcoin (BTC), Ledn co-founder Mauricio di Bartolomeo achieved significant success by shorting the Venezuelan Bolivar (which rapidly depreciated against the strong US dollar). Today, as the dollar continues to depreciate relative to Bitcoin, borrowing against Bitcoin as collateral, rather than selling it directly, has become a more viable investment strategy.
"Before I got into Bitcoin, my most successful investment strategy was shorting the Bolivar with US dollars," di Bartolomeo revealed in an interview with Cointelegraph at the Consensus conference in Toronto, Canada.
"My approach was to borrow Bolivars and use them to buy US dollars, holding strong dollar assets while maintaining a borrowing position against the weak currency," he further explained.
With the rise of Bitcoin-backed lending services, investors can now adopt similar strategies by using harder currencies as collateral to effectively implement this investment method.
This was one of the main motivations for founding Ledn, a company based in the Cayman Islands that provides Bitcoin holders with the ability to access US dollar liquidity without having to sell their Bitcoin holdings.
"By borrowing against Bitcoin, you are essentially doing the same thing, but you are actually holding hard currency—Bitcoin—while borrowing US dollars, which is a relatively weak currency," di Bartolomeo explained, adding:
"This creates a virtuous cycle; we have repeatedly witnessed this pattern in real estate mortgages, stock-backed loans, and gold-backed borrowing, and Bitcoin is no different in this regard."
The crypto lending industry in which Ledn operates is broad, having significantly developed over the past five years due to the rapid rise in Bitcoin's value, the influx of institutional investors, and the increased utility of stablecoins.
According to research data from Galaxy Research, the crypto lending market is valued at $30.2 billion as of Q4 2024, more than tripling from two years ago. Nevertheless, the overall industry size has yet to recover to the peak levels of 2021.
Researchers attribute the recent growth to the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, which allow users to collateralize loans on-chain. The latest Cointelegraph report further confirms this trend, detailing that the value of assets locked in DeFi lending protocols is steadily increasing.
Ledn ranks among the top three centralized finance (CeFi) lending institutions, with a loan volume reaching $9.9 billion by the end of 2024. According to the Galaxy research report, the three dominant CeFi lending institutions—Ledn, Tether, and Galaxy—collectively control 89% of the market share.
Related: Ripple Launches Cross-Border Blockchain Payment Service in the UAE
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