This is a framed tweet from a Venezuelan socialist partisan calling me a "lacra" which in Spanish means "scourge." The framed Tweet (no longer available sadly, at least I couldn't locate it on Twitter) was gifted to me by my Airtm co-founders, Josh Kliot & Ruben Galindo, on the occasion of a 50th bday party that I threw at my ranch in 2018. The object holds a lot of meaning for me. If you value freedom, entrepreneurship, and startups, then theoretically some of that value will attach to this NFT created by this NFP.

The reason the socialists in Venezuela (and around Latam) have been so cheesed with Airtm and its co-founders is that our little fintech startup makes it safe, easy, and cheap to work-around Maduro's capital and currency controls, as well as his bitcoin and general crypto bans.

Airtm is unique in that it combines a managed peer-to-peer marketplace (like localbitcoins but for USD and crypto) with permissionless blockchain integrations and regulated bank connections. It's as strange beast in the same P2P tech family as Uber and Airbnb.

Maduro's socialist policies-- continued from the previous cacique Chavez-- have ruined Venezuela, resulting in the world's worst streak of hyperinflation and creating millions of economic refugees. Maduro's brain-dead central bank policy debased the currency so that it became worth less than toilet paper (because you couldn't even wipe your ass with it).

Add in currency and capital controls enforced via commercial banks and the socialist braintrust rendered the nation's banking system useless for capital inflows, such as remittance, donations, and payments. No one wanted to send good money (USD) to be turned into broken money (Bolivares), at Maduro's rigged exchange rate.

Not when they could use Airtm to save in USD and receive payments from abroad, converting to Bolivares as needed at free market rates. Maduro put all the Airtm founders on a terrorist watch list, tried to block Airtm at the DNS level, and threatened Airtm's clients and agent network with jail.

We grew faster than ever thanks to Maduro's incompetence and to Bitcoin, which Airtm's anything-to-dollar forex agents use to cycle money back into USD in their Airtm accounts.

Being called a scourge of socialism because a startup I co-founded with young entrepreneurs is super successful at protecting individual sovereignty and human rights against tyrannical wealth-destroying centralized power is one of the greatest honors of my life.

This NFT represents all of that, a unique moment in Airtm's startup trajectory when we found product/market fit and went viral in Venezuela and surrounding countries, defying an incompetent tyrant and returning power to individuals, families, and businesses.