Ledn co-founder: "Before investing in Bitcoin (BTC), my most successful investment was shorting the Bolivar coin."

Source: Cointelegraph Original text: "Ledn co-founder: 'Before investing in Bitcoin (BTC), my most successful investment was shorting the Bolivar (Bolivar)'"

Before discovering Bitcoin (BTC), Ledn co-founder Mauricio di Bartolomeo achieved significant success by shorting the Venezuelan bolívar (which has rapidly depreciated against the strong dollar). Today, as the dollar continues to depreciate relative to Bitcoin, using Bitcoin as collateral for loans instead of selling it directly has become a more viable investment strategy.

"Before getting into Bitcoin, my most successful investment strategy was shorting the Bolívar with dollars," di Bartolomeo revealed in an interview with Cointelegraph at the Consensus conference in Toronto, Canada.

"My approach is to borrow bolivars and use them to buy dollars, holding strong dollar assets while maintaining a borrowing position against the weak currency," he further explained.

With the rise of Bitcoin mortgage services, investors can now adopt similar strategies by using harder currencies as collateral to effectively implement this investment method.

This is one of the main motivations for founding Ledn, a company based in the Cayman Islands that provides Bitcoin holders with the ability to access dollar liquidity without having to sell their Bitcoin holdings.

By using Bitcoin as collateral for lending, "you are essentially doing the same thing, but in reality, you are holding hard currency - Bitcoin, while borrowing dollars, which is a relatively weaker currency," di Bartolomeo explained, adding:

"This creates a positive feedback loop, and we have repeatedly witnessed this pattern in real estate mortgages, stock mortgages, and gold-backed loans; Bitcoin is no different in this regard."

The cryptocurrency lending industry in which Ledn operates is vast, having significantly developed over the past five years due to the rapid rise in Bitcoin's value, the influx of institutional investors, and the increased utility of stablecoins.

According to research data from Galaxy Research, the valuation of the crypto lending market is expected to reach $30.2 billion by the fourth quarter of 2024, more than tripling from two years ago. Nonetheless, the overall industry size has yet to recover to the peak levels of 2021.

Researchers attribute the recent growth to the rise of decentralized finance applications, which allow users to collateralize loans on-chain. The latest Cointelegraph report further confirms this trend, detailing that the value of currency locked in DeFi lending protocols is steadily increasing.

Ledn ranks among the top three centralized finance ( CeFi ) lending institutions, with a loan scale reaching $9.9 billion by the end of 2024. According to a Galaxy research report, the three dominant CeFi lending institutions—Ledn, Tether, and Galaxy—together control 89% of the total market share.

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