Mauricio Di Bartolomeo is the Co-founder of Ledn, the leader in Bitcoin-backed lending. He grew up in Venezuela, living through the early tremors of what would become one of the most dramatic monetary collapses in modern history, before coming to Canada in 2003. His front-row seat to hyperinflation under Chavez and Maduro shaped a deeply practical understanding of how money, debt, and institutional trust actually function, and gave him the conviction to build Ledn, which has issued over $10 billion in loans since 2018 and holds an estimated 30% market share in consumer Bitcoin-backed lending globally. We cover what hyperinflation actually feels like from the inside, why the wealthy borrow while everyone else is told to save, the philosophical debate over whether Bitcoin-backed debt is morally sound, and what the recent seismic shifts in Venezuela’s political landscape mean for an oppressed country.
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Takeaways:
Hyperinflation and inflation are not on the same spectrum. Inflation is a rational economic response to an increase in money supply; hyperinflation is an emotional, societal breakdown of trust in every institution at once. When Maduro stole the 2013 elections on national television and started shooting protesters, the price of bread became irrelevant. People were not recalibrating their financial models. They were fleeing.
In a hyperinflationary environment, your second job becomes more important than your first. Mauricio described payday in Venezuela as the moment workers would beg to leave early so they could convert their wages before the currency lost another chunk of its value by close of business. Saving, in the traditional sense, became the fastest path to poverty.
The wealthy have always known something that financial advice hides: governments borrow the currency they print, and they are structurally incentivized to devalue it. When the government is short fiat, holding fiat long is working against the biggest player in the game. The people who got ahead in Venezuela were not the ones who saved bolivars. People who knew how to use hyperinflation properly got a massive tail within the fiat world.
Bitcoin-backed debt and fiat consumer debt are not the same instrument wearing the same name. When your collateral is Bitcoin you already own, you are not wagering future labor against a lender. You are unlocking liquidity from an asset you have already earned. The debt slavery that people rightly fear comes from unsecured credit. It does not come from a loan backed by something you already possess.
Automated liquidation, which feels cold and mechanical, is actually one of the more honest features of Bitcoin-backed lending. There is no human judgment, no favoritism, no deals made quietly for preferred clients. The rules are known from day one, and the system executes them identically for everyone.
The Asset-backed securities (ABS) market is not just a funding mechanism. It is the pathway through which Bitcoin lending can scale to match the actual demand for Bitcoin-backed credit. A $1 trillion lending market needs capital sources that run at that depth. The $1.85 trillion US consumer ABS market is one of the few places that can supply it, and Ledn’s S&P investment-grade rating is the key that unlocks the door.
A mortgage, a yen carry trade, a Bitcoin-backed loan, and a wealthy Venezuelan borrowing bolivars at 24% during 5,000% hyperinflation are all the same trade at different scales. You borrow the currency that someone else can print and hold the asset that nobody can print. The people across history who have built wealth in fiat systems have almost universally done this, while the conventional advice given to everyone else points in the opposite direction.
Venezuela has been frozen in time since the late 1990s. The cars are from the last economic boom. The skylines have not changed. The colors of the houses are the same. What that physical stasis represents is something more profound than economic stagnation: when people stop believing in their own future, they also stop building, investing, and imagining one.
What changed in Venezuela on January 3rd was not just political. For the first time in 25 years, the actors who once moved openly against US interests are now publicly distancing themselves from acts of aggression and releasing figures they had imprisoned for decades. The geopolitical ground shifted, and with it, the economic calculus. American Airlines doubled its flights to Caracas. Barquisimeto got its first international flight in decades. Investors are calling Mauricio asking for introductions. These are all signals.
The debate over whether debt is inherently immoral, as Jimmy Song argued in the debate with Mauricio, misses what he considers the essential question: is it a voluntary transaction between consenting adults? If someone understands that the government will continue debasing fiat and wants to borrow that fiat to hold something the government cannot print, the moral case against that transaction is hard to make.
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I was recently banned from Stripe, so I cannot have paid memberships on Substack… but there’s always another way!
