By Katherine Long and Vicky Ge Huang

He is a college dropout who hawked energy drinks as a teen and sold Oreos to make rent. Under "skills" on LinkedIn, he listed "hustling expert."

Last month, Hayden Davis, 28 years old, became the face of the highest-profile cryptocurrency scandal since the implosion of FTX in 2022, one that has ensnared Argentine President Javier Milei.

Propelled by self-confidence and networking savvy, Davis went from cookie seller to erstwhile crypto king, according to interviews and a review of more than a decade of social-media posts, podcasts and blog posts.

Davis, his family and their venture-capital firm, Kelsier Ventures, were behind the Feb. 14 launch of $LIBRA, a meme coin that was intended to help fund the development of the Argentine economy, according to a website describing the project. When Milei promoted $LIBRA on social media, the price soared -- until it crashed, eviscerating up to roughly $1 billion in market value, according to DEX Screener, a crypto data provider.

More than 10,000 investors have lost a total of at least $250 million, according to blockchain analytics firm Nansen. Davis, though, has acknowledged that he walked away with close to $100 million by quickly selling before the crash.

Davis, who didn't respond to numerous requests for an interview, said in podcast interviews after $LIBRA's crash that while he regretted that investors had lost so much, meme coins are inherently hazardous.

Milei didn't respond to a request for comment.

Meme coins are a type of digital token created often as jokes and mainly for speculation. As news of a token launch spreads on social media, meme coins can spike in value until a small group of investors -- often insiders -- sell at a profit, saddling the remaining investors with losses.

$LIBRA is only the latest example of presidents joining the meme-coin craze. In January, President Trump launched a coin, $TRUMP, that also saw a massive price spike followed by a rapid fall. Days later, first lady Melania Trump released her own version, $MELANIA, a project Hayden Davis has said he was also involved in.

Kelsier is led by Davis's father, Tom Davis, a felon who led an international Christian adoption nonprofit, then became a leadership coach and serial entrepreneur, according to law-enforcement and nonprofit records, social-media posts and his public statements. Through Hayden's mother, the family springs from a line of former adherents to a violent Christian fundamentalist sect, the Church of the First Born of the Lamb of God. Her father was killed by believers after fleeing the group when she was a young child, she said on an episode of her sons' podcast. She was never a member of the sect.

Now threats of lawsuits and demands for criminal investigations are circling Milei and Davis. Argentina's federal prosecutor has opened a fraud investigation into the launch of $LIBRA, citing allegations that crypto entrepreneurs paid for access to Milei.

A smooth talker

By the time he launched $LIBRA, Davis had a string of short-lived business ventures more than a decade long.

He started selling energy drinks for Limu, a multilevel marketing company his father was involved in that sold beverages including Blu Frog and Lean Burn, when he was 17.

He attended the evangelical Christian college Liberty University for two semesters on a soccer scholarship, a spokesperson for the school confirmed. He launched a T-shirt printing company, dabbled in what he described on a podcast as "the world of e-commerce," interned for a private-equity firm, and briefly joined a professional Spanish soccer team.

By 2021, he was living in Los Angeles with two roommates, in the middle of what he referred to as his "fifth business failure" on a podcast he hosted with his brother Gideon.

That is when the Davis family began embracing cryptocurrency. Lured by tax advantages the city had offered the industry, Tom Davis began doing business in Dubai under the name Kelsier.

Kelsier began making early-stage investments, including the cryptocurrency exchange Meteora, where both $LIBRA and $MELANIA launched. Later it offered marketing services to crypto exchanges, nonfungible tokens and meme coins, according to founders who worked with Kelsier.

At the time, Tom Davis was far from a cryptocurrency expert. Earlier he had gotten into trouble forging checks, he told the Christian Broadcasting Network, and pleaded guilty to burglary, according to law-enforcement records. He went to Bible school and became an entrepreneur, investing in bricks-and-mortar businesses such as Skrimp Shack, a chain of seafood restaurants in the U.S. and the Middle East.

Though Tom Davis was Kelsier's founder, Hayden was its face. Industry peers who worked with Hayden said he's a smooth talker and a natural dealmaker.

"If you sit down with him and he wants to sell you something, he will convince you," said Steven Enamakel, a Dubai-based crypto entrepreneur who briefly worked with Hayden on a project unrelated to $LIBRA.

Hayden also had a knack for getting into high-profile projects. Ben Chow, the co-founder of Meteora, said in a social-media post that he referred Hayden and Kelsier to the team behind the $MELANIA token because "they appeared to be trustworthy."

Chow, who recently resigned from Meteora, declined requests for an interview.

By the fall, Hayden and Gideon were helping to broker a deal between Milei and the crypto exchange Cube, a trading platform founded by an ex-developer from Ken Griffin's hedge fund Citadel to "help with crypto stuff over there," Gideon said on a podcast.

"It's signed and stamped by Javier Milei," he said on the podcast. "We're doing an event with him in two weeks."

In October, Hayden, Tom and Gideon Davis sat next to Cube's founder as Milei gave a speech at a technology conference organized by Argentine entrepreneur Mauricio Novelli, according to a video of the event. The next month, Hayden Davis and Novelli were spotted entering Argentina's presidential palace, local media reported.

In a statement, Novelli said he didn't handle $LIBRA funds or make any money trading the coin.

'LONG LIVE FREEDOM, DAMN IT...!!!'

By January, Hayden was riding high.

The $MELANIA coin launched on Jan. 19, soaring to a peak market cap of about $2 billion before falling, though Hayden said in an interview with the crypto journalist and YouTuber Stephen Findeisen, known online as Coffeezilla, that he made "no money" on the coin.

(A White House spokesperson referred questions to the Trump Organization, which didn't respond to a request for comment.)

On Jan. 30, Hayden got a bump from Milei, who touted their connection, posting a selfie of them to X and writing that Hayden was "advising me on the impact and applications of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence in the country."

"LONG LIVE FREEDOM, DAMN IT...!!!" Milei added.

Two weeks later, Davis and his partners released $LIBRA. The evening of the launch, Milei posted on X in support of $LIBRA, calling it a project that will "focus on encouraging the growth of the Argentine economy." Within hours, the token surged -- and then lost most of its value by midnight.

Milei deleted his original post, claiming in a new post he hadn't been "aware of the details of the project." But in a video posted to X the day after the launch, Hayden appeared to underscore his relationship with the president.

"I am indeed Javier Milei's adviser," Davis said.

By Sunday, Feb. 16, the Argentine president was facing backlash from investors, calls for impeachment from his political opponents and fraud complaints from lawyers. An Argentine law firm asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Securities and Exchange Commission to open an investigation into Hayden Davis. Both agencies declined to comment on the existence of an investigation.

In later interviews, Hayden defended the practice of using insider knowledge to make money from tokens such as $MELANIA and $LIBRA.

"It is an insider's game," he said in the interview with Findeisen. "This is an unregulated casino."

Milei, too, compared the crypto market to gambling in an interview with Argentine media outlet Todo Noticias, adding that people who lost money on $LIBRA had no right to complain.

"It's like someone who goes and plays Russian roulette and the bullet hits him," Milei said.

Still, Hayden Davis has expressed remorse for the way $LIBRA turned out. In media interviews, he's contemplated using the $100 million he made -- money he has said he believes belongs to Argentina -- to prop up the price of $LIBRA. And he's said that he has done nothing different from any other meme-coin founder.

"Maybe I shouldn't have done that in hindsight, whatever," he told Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy in a livestream after the scandal broke. "But I'm not a piece of s -- ."

Write to Katherine Long at katherine.long@wsj.com and Vicky Ge Huang at vicky.huang@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

Kelsier Ventures has made early-stage investments in cryptocurrency startups. "The 'Hustling Expert' Behind Argentina's $250 Million Crypto Scandal," at 5:30 a.m. ET, incorrectly said that Kelsier was an early-stage investor in cryptocurrency exchange Meteora.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 03, 2025 17:01 ET (22:01 GMT)

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