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Argentina, a nation where people use crypto as a daily tool to survive inflation, is considering lifting its 3-year ban on banks’ crypto activities, allowing trading and custody under a new regulatory framework. 

If approved, Argentina’s central banks would finally be allowed to let customers buy, sell, and even store cryptocurrencies directly from their banking apps.

Argentina’s Central Bank Eyes Crypto Services for Banks

Since May 2022, Argentina’s central bank, the Banco Central de la Republica Argentina (BCRA), has maintained strict regulations prohibiting traditional banks from dealing with crypto. The goal was to reduce money-laundering risks and avoid financial instability.

But under President Javier Milei, a known Bitcoin supporter, the country is rethinking that approach.

Since taking office in December 2023, President Milei has pushed for more financial freedom and believes people should be free to use different currencies, including Bitcoin, without heavy government controls.

What the New Framework Could Bring?

Multiple reports confirm that the BCRA is drafting a new framework that would allow banks to offer,

• Offer crypto trading
• Provide crypto custody
• List only major “blue-chip” coins like BTC, ETH, USDC, USDT, and XRP
• Follow strict KYC/AML rules under new CNV regulations
• Operate crypto services inside separate legal units with higher capital, security, and liquidity requirements

Argentina is moving from banning crypto to fully regulating it, becoming one of the first inflation-hit countries to bring crypto into its banking system.

Why Argentina Is Making This Move Now

Crypto use in Argentina has grown very fast in the last three years. Many people turned to Bitcoin and stablecoins because the peso kept losing value.

Inflation once hit 1,427% in 2023, and even now it stays above 2% each month, so families use crypto to protect their money.

By letting banks offer crypto services, the BCRA wants to make crypto safer, reduce the use of informal platforms, improve tax tracking, and keep money flowing more smoothly in the economy.

Approval Timeline: April 2026

Experts familiar with the news believe the final green light may arrive around April 2026, but internal planning has already begun. 

If completed, Argentina could become a global case study in how traditional banking and crypto can work together during an inflation crisis.

On Dec. 1 in Val‑d’Oise, France, the father of a Dubai‑based crypto entrepreneur was kidnapped off the street; another entry in Jameson Lopp’s directory of 225‑plus verified physical attacks on digital asset holders.

The database Lopp, the chief security officer at Bitcoin wallet Casa, has maintained for six years, shows the pace of coercion rising fast, with a 169% jump in reported physical attacks in 2025.

The risk itself isn’t unique to crypto: gold brokers, luxury resellers, even cash couriers have faced the same basic weapon for centuries (violence). What’s new is that digital assets are now being stolen face‑to‑face.

The shift is fueling a new arms race in wallet design. “Panic wallets” with duress triggers that can instantly wipe balances, send false decoys, or call for help with a subtle biometric gesture.

The idea sounds elegant until you add a wrench. As Lopp told Cointelegraph, “Ultimately, use of duress wallets relies upon speculation about the attacker, and you can’t possibly know their motivations and knowledge.”

The data behind the fear

Lopp’s findings suggest wrench attacks follow market cycles. They rise during bull runs and periods of intense over‑the‑counter (OTC) trading, when large deals move off exchanges. The US leads in absolute cases, although the per-capita risk is higher in the United Arab Emirates and Iceland.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed creating a trustless onchain gas futures market to give users and developers a way to hedge against future transaction costs.

In an X post, Buterin said users often ask whether today’s relatively low fees will persist over the next two years, even with ongoing scaling work across the Ethereum roadmap.

On Ethereum, “gas” is the fee users pay to make the network do something — like sending a transaction or using a smart contract. Every action on Ethereum requires a small amount of computational work, and gas measures how much of that work is needed. When the network is busy, gas costs rise and vice versa.

For years, Ethereum was known for wide swings in gas fees, with costs spiking sharply during periods of heavy activity, especially during NFT booms, DeFi growth cycles, and popular token launches. Because fees rose and fell with demand, users often had little visibility into what transactions might cost from one week to the next.

That unpredictability has eased in the past year as Ethereum rolled out a series of upgrades aimed at boosting network capacity and smoothing out congestion.

Buterin argued that a gas futures market — effectively “a prediction market on the basefee” — could offer “a clear signal of people’s expectations of future gas fees” and allow participants to pre-purchase gas for defined time intervals.

“People would get a clear signal of people's expectations of future gas fees, and would even be able to hedge against future gas prices,” Buterin wrote. “Effectively prepaying for any specific quantity of gas in a specific time interval.”

Pushback: 'No natural short side'

The idea drew several challenges, including from Hasu, the pseudonymous strategy steward at Flashbots and an advisor to Lido and Steakhouse.

“The problem is this market has no natural short side,” Hasu wrote on X. “Many people are short gas and want to hedge it. But no one is long gas. There may be some noise trading, but not enough interest to make a market at a meaningful scale.”

In response, Buterin asked whether “the protocol should be the short side,” suggesting an “onchain auction for basefee claiming rights, at least for 1m gas per block.”

Hasu countered that such a structure may not solve the core issue. “Whoever buys the basefee arguably pays 99% of that value to the protocol,” he said, adding that anyone buying the basefee would only do so if they expect it to rise, which creates a disincentive for shorting.

Buterin replied that the mechanism is aimed at letting “users, or application devs on behalf of their users,” pre-purchase gas to move from “short to neutral,” while the protocol would move from “long… to ~neutral” on the portion of gas pre-sold.

Gnosis co-founder Martin Koppelmann also weighed in, arguing that Ethereum’s burn mechanism complicates the concept.

“Without the burn, every validator would be a natural seller of such a hedge,” he wrote. “With the burn, you only get sellers that need to take on significant risk themselves, and this will charge a lot.”

Buterin’s comments arrive amid a broader period of active development around Ethereum’s cost structure, scaling roadmap, and transaction throughput.

Last week, Ethereum completed its Fusaka upgrade, kicking off the network’s new twice-per-year hard-fork schedule. Ahead of Fusaka, the protocol also raised the block gas limit to 60 million, which increased throughput to record levels.

Buterin has also recently unveiled Kohaku, a privacy-focused framework designed to improve confidentiality on Ethereum, and discussed how “DeFi as a form of savings is finally viable” in an interview about scaling, security, and financial freedom.

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© 2025 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

By Callum Keown

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were jumping early Monday as digital assets looked to mount another rebound ahead of the Federal Reserve's final interest-rate decision of the year.

Bitcoin was trading at $92,018 early in the day, up more than 3% over the past 24 hours after slipping below $88,000 at one point on Sunday. The world's largest cryptocurrency has struggled to move above the $94,000 level despite getting close on several occasions in recent weeks. It remains 27% off its record high above $126,000 reached in October.

Ethereum was up 4% at $3,158, while popular altcoin XRP rose 3.4% to $2.10.

A Fed rate cut could help keep the momentum going. Cryptocurrencies typically get a boost from lower borrowing costs as it makes them more attractive relative to lower-yielding assets. Markets are pricing in an 87% chance the central bank cuts interest rates by a quarter-point on Wednesday.

But that assumption has been baked in for a while and hasn't sparked a sustained crypto comeback yet.

However, the path for Bitcoin may be a bit more complicated than that.

"A large share of Bitcoin is currently held at a loss, so each move toward $96,000-$100,000 meets selling from holders who want to exit at break-even," said Arthur Azizov, founder of B2 Ventures.

Those dynamics go some way to explaining the disconnect between the stock market and cryptos, he added. The S&P 500 is up 17% in 2025, while Bitcoin is down around 1.4%.

"I see an idling, maybe even stagnating market. Only a strong move above $100,000 could flip the script, restore confidence, and open the way toward $120,000+ level," he said. But if that fails, he sees another pullback — this time to around $82,000 to $88,000.

Write to Callum Keown at callum.keown@dowjones.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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