7 hours ago
1422
A federal judge in Argentina has issued an order to freeze 25 crypto accounts involved with the country’s investigation into the infamous $LIBRA token. The investigation was triggered after a crash that left users counting losses estimated between $100 million and $250 million after the $LIBRA token’s market capitalization crashed 89% within three hours of President Javier Milei promoting the token on his X account.
Judge Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi also ordered six exchanges to identify the owners and hand over the full transaction histories of the frozen accounts, at the request of prosecutor Eduardo Taiano.
Why is Argentina ordering to freeze crypto accounts?
The order to freeze 25 accounts registered across six crypto exchanges is the latest development in a growing inquiry into a money-laundering probe into the $LIBRA token President Javier Milei once promoted via now-deleted posts on his X account.
According to Infobae, the judge wants information on:
- Ten Binance addresses
- Eight on Bybit
- Two on OKX
- Two on CoinEx
- Two on Bitfinex
- One on FixedFloat
The order is asking for almost every detail that customers submit to platforms as part of their Know Your Customer (KYC) process. Other than the account-opening documents, Judge Marcelo also demanded internal memos, IP connection logs, data about linked bank accounts and full transaction records. Argentina’s Federal Police cybercrime unit will serve the orders.
As for the rationale for the order, the federal judge said it could help them trace and potentially claw back some of the ill-gotten gains from the scheme that led to losses for users.
Can a judge enforce a freeze on crypto wallets?
For now, Judge Marcelo’s order has not stopped money from moving. However, unlike fully custodial wallets, the court can press the exchanges into compliance, which would give investigators a proper map of who controlled accounts and where the money went on top of the freeze order.
The request rests on a technical report from the police cybercrime department, which used backward tracing and open-source analysis to reconstruct the money trail. According to Infobae, the funds started in a cluster the report calls the “Team Libra Wallets,” which pushed millions of tokens into the Meteora liquidity protocol on Solana on February 14 and 15, 2025, before pooling in a single intermediary wallet.
The report describes a large exit on May 10, 2026, when 498,539.85 USDT landed on the Tron network after an equivalent USDC deposit on Solana. The swap cleared in about 16 seconds using automated liquidity providers rather than a conventional exchange.
From there, investigators say the funds were broken into small daily amounts across many wallets, a laundering method the report labels digital smurfing.
A scandal that traces back to a presidential post
The case begins with Milei’s February 14, 2025, post on X, which promoted $LIBRA and helped drive it from around one cent toward five dollars in hours before it collapsed. TRM Labs, which tracked the launch, reported the token’s market capitalization briefly reached roughly $4.5 billion and then fell about 89% within three hours of the post.
$LIBRA price chart. Source: CoinMarketCapMilei deleted the message and later said he had no connection to the project and was not aware of its details.
Loss estimates depend on who’s citing what data. Some put losses near $100 million across more than 40,000 people, while others estimate more than $250 million.
Foreign firms Kip Network, represented by Julian Peh, and Kelsier Ventures, run by US businessman Hayden Davis, are named as participants in the token’s creation. Lobbyist Mauricio Novelli, his associate Manuel Terrones Godoy and Davis are charged in the Argentine probe.
What happens next turns on the exchanges. Whether Binance, Bybit, OKX, CoinEx, FixedFloat and Bitfinex hand over the KYC files, and how quickly, will shape how far investigators can follow the money.
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