🎙 Buenos Aires City Innovation Chief Talks Crypto Tax Payments and How Web3 Will Revolutionize Democracy

This week we speak to Diego Fernandez, the secretary of innovation and digital transformation for the city of Buenos Aires. Recently, news broke that Buenos Aires will be taking tax payments via crypto, an initiative that Diego helped shape. We talk about what this means for residents of the city and how it works in practice. Diego also addressed critics’ response to the measure, who questioned why Argentines would spend crypto instead of holding it as a store of value. Diego dives into the city’s broader plans with crypto, including how it wants to leverage the tools and data at its disposal to build a blockchain-based identity system.

Crypto and government have been somewhat at odds with each other. We discuss the tension of how governments, which are centralized entities by definition, can use decentralized technology. Diego outlines the long-term vision of how these two worlds can interact. The interview was recorded before Argentina’s central bank effectively banned banks from offering crypto in response to pressure from the IMF. While we did not discuss this issue, we did get into how a pro-crypto city can deal with a less friendly environment for the industry on a national level.

Podcast audio and video was edited by Daniel Flynn and Gary Leuci. Transcript was edited by Samuel Haig.

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

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👀 Only paid subscribers have access to the full interview transcript below.