His name is Orlando Mellino. He is 75 years old. Until recently he sold pizza. He has no known background in cryptocurrency, no verifiable history in financial markets, and no evident connection to the digital asset industry that might explain what happened next: in the days following a meeting between LIBRA token creator Hayden Davis and President Javier Milei at the Casa Rosada, Mellino received transfers totaling more than one million US dollars from Davis's accounts.
That is the narrative thread at the center of Argentina's expanding LIBRA crypto scandal, as reported by El Diario AR on Wednesday. The case is not merely a story about a cryptocurrency that collapsed and wiped out retail investors. It is, as prosecutors and opposition legislators are now framing it, a story about the proximity of large sums of unexplained money to the highest office in Argentina.
The LIBRA token was promoted in February 2025 with a post on President Milei's personal social media accounts, describing it as a project to fund Argentine small businesses. The token surged dramatically on launch before collapsing in what analysts described as a classic pump-and-dump pattern. Thousands of retail investors — many Argentine, many international — lost their money in the hours following the crash. Milei subsequently deleted his posts and distanced himself from the project, claiming he had been unaware of the token's structure. A congressional investigation was opened. Federal prosecutors began examining the money flows.
What prosecutors found, according to El Diario AR's reporting, was a trail that passed through Mellino. Davis, the Texas-based cryptocurrency promoter who created and launched LIBRA, had met with Milei at the Casa Rosada in the period before the token's launch — a meeting the government confirmed but described as routine. The transfers to Mellino followed that meeting. Prosecutors say they have not yet established the purpose of the transfers or whether Mellino was acting as an intermediary, a beneficiary, or something else. What they have established is that a 75-year-old retired pizza vendor with no crypto background received seven figures from the man at the center of the scandal.
Mellino, for his part, has not provided a public statement explaining the transfers. His identity became public through the prosecution's investigative filings. No charges have been brought against him. His lawyers have not commented publicly on the matter.
The investigation is unfolding against a backdrop of broader political turbulence. The LIBRA affair has become the primary avenue through which the opposition has sought to challenge the integrity of Milei's administration — not on economic policy, where the president retains a significant block of supporters willing to endure adjustment pain in exchange for the promise of long-run stability, but on corruption, the charge that most potently erodes presidential authority in Argentina's political culture.
Federal judge María Romilda Servini, whose court is handling the investigation, has ordered the preservation of financial records related to the LIBRA launch and the subsequent transfers. Opposition legislators from the Unión por la Patria bloc have demanded Milei appear before Congress to explain his role in promoting the token and whether he had advance knowledge of its structure. The government has refused, characterizing the demands as politically motivated harassment.
The case raises deeper questions about the regulation — or absence of regulation — of cryptocurrency promotion in Argentina, a country where dollar-denominated assets have always held special appeal given the peso's chronic instability. The combination of an unregulated asset class, a presidential endorsement, and a retail investor base already sensitized by decades of financial crises created the conditions for the LIBRA collapse. Whether those conditions also created the opportunity for coordinated enrichment at the top is precisely what prosecutors are trying to determine.
In Argentina, as across nations blessed and cursed by potential, the gap between what could be and what is defines the national psychology. Milei was elected as the anti-corruption candidate as much as the anti-inflation candidate — a figure who would break not only with Peronist economic populism but with the clientelism and opacity that had characterized Argentine governance across political cycles. The LIBRA investigation does not yet prove corruption. But a million-dollar transfer to a retired pizza vendor with no crypto history, routed through the man who launched a token after meeting the president, is not nothing. Prosecutors are carefully tracing what it is.
