Part Four of Can I Pay With This?: Eighteen Ways to Pay for Ice Cream

This is Part Four of the eight-part series: Can I Pay With This: A stablecoin experiment in Buenos Aires. Thank you to the Ethereum Foundation and the EV Mavericks for their support, without which this experiment could never have happened.

Catch up here:

Part One: Decentralized or Destitute
Money, monkeys and mild terror

Part Two: First Contact with Reality
KYC on a hostel bunk bed

Part Three: WE ACCEPT BITCOIN (sort of)
OK, that was the worst title for an Ethereum subreddit ever

Part Four: Eighteen Ways to Pay for Ice Cream <– You are here
Stablecoins, FX hell and a missing keyboard

—

My first real encounter with hyperinflation comes with breakfast. I've been frequenting a bakery on Avenida de Mayo for their breakfast combo: A cup of coffee with two tiny croissant-like things stuffed with ham and cheese. Last week, the price was 6,000 pesos. This week, it's 8,200.

I realize with a start that nowhere in this city have I seen a printed price. They are all on chalkboards or handwritten with ballpoint pen on menus that have been updated several times already.

No one but me expects things to cost the same this week as they did last week.

I'm converting small amounts of money every time to motivate me to try harder to find a way to get cash for stablecoins. The actual result is that I keep running out of cash.

I've been told not to use ATMs as they charge an exorbitant fee but I'm willing to pay a fee in this case, or at least find out what it is. I find a bank with an ATM which seems like the most likely bet and tap my card. It's accepted and I have a few options for withdrawing cash, from 10,000 pesos to 50,000 pesos. That's not a lot. I tap 50,000 pesos. An error. That is over my daily limit. I back up and check my bank. Nope. Nowhere near my daily limit. This is a limit from the cash machine, not from my side.

I go back to the machine and work my way down the list. 50, 40, 30. Finally, it agrees that I may have 30,000 pesos, about twenty dollars, but only if I pay a $7 transaction fee. I politely decline. Obnoxiously, the charge shows up as pending on my card despite my backing out: the funds are released the following day.

I have learned my lesson about ATMs.

Binance and Bybit advertisements are posted all over the city, bold and bright like emergency exits. These are centralized exchanges, the easy way to hold crypto. Instead of having a crypto wallet, the exchanges hold your funds for you. It's centralized, permissioned, requires full trust in the exchange to do right by you and to continue existing. Trading trust in banks for loosely regulated financial institutions. In Argentina, this is not necessarily a bad decision.

Over my coffee, I scan for crypto news. El Submarino Jujuy, a provincial news site, has a long detailed piece on how to monitor five simultaneous exchange rates: official, blue, MEP, CCL and crypto dollars. What surprises me is how little explanation there is. The article assumes that the reader already has an exchange account, already holds ETH and BTC. There's no explanation of wallets or blockchains, only strategy. I cannot imagine an article like this in The Guardian or The New York Times, unless it had a sidebar on "The mythology of crypto" and a quote from a distressed 60-something who lost everything.

And yet, while we are excited about smart contracts, leverage and liquidity protocols, most people here don't seem to be talking about trading. They're holding stablecoins, not for yield, not for innovation, but simply to avoid erosion. They are content to use centralized exchange cards, converting at checkout, side-stepping the crumbling peso.

I do it too. Tapping my cards and scanning my QR apps for as many transactions as possible so I can limit my exposure to the peso.

"May I?" An old man wants the other half of my table. He looks me over. "Where are you from?"

I tell him.

He nods knowingly and then asks, "Is that Occidental or Oriental?"

This is not a question that I was expecting. "Occidental, I think?"

He nods again, as if he knew that all along.

When I go back to my phone, I get a lucky break—an event posted to Twitter: Stablecoin Ice Cream. A challenge to meet at Crecimiento to descend on the best heladería in Buenos Aires. "Let's buy some ice cream using ONLY stablecoins." I sign up immediately.

There are prizes for the best and worst FX rate. More people add more prizes, including 1000% cashback for using WalletConnect to pay for your ice cream The organizer thought probably no one would come. In the end, eighteen of us show up and he's slightly panicked that he didn't warn the ice cream shop.

The server does his best to cope with a slightly feral crowd of crypto enthusiasts descending on him on a Friday afternoon. Someone convinces him to install a Settle wallet so that they can transact in USDC for the ice cream. It almost works until the owner intervenes and insists: pesos only.

We each choose two scoops of ice cream. I get spicy mango and pistachio, which turns out to be an inspired combination.

I scan the QR code to pay with Peanut. It fails. I switch to my trusty crypto card, which works. Someone else tries to scan the QR code with their Metamask wallet app, which doesn't. We test Peanut (which works for everyone else), Gnosis Pay, Yodl, Ready (Starknet), Redot. Quite a few give up and pay in cash.

The organizer posts an update on Twitter:

50% of participants who are actually working in 9-5 jobs in web3 today couldn't pay with stablecoin on-chain.

The FX rate varies by application but also by when the ice cream as bought, with noticeable volatility even on the same wallets over the half hour we took to order.

I win a prize for the third-worst FX rate: 25 $BOND tokens. Now I have to find out what $BOND is.

No one claims the 1000% cash back for using WalletConnect. No one can work out how.

But it's a success. I have another two apps to try. A third, Luca, is tackling exactly the problem that I was thinking about: onboarding regular people to deposit their savings in stablecoins to gain yield from DeFi, with no need to understand any of the machinery.

I explain about trying to use crypto in Buenos Aires, that I've still not seen any way to buy pesos with stablecoins.

"Why do you want to?" I have DeFi cards. I have an app that scans QR codes. I can pay seamlessly in restaurants and ice cream shops and kiosks. The transaction goes through and boom, it's on-chain, final, and the grocer gets paid. What more do I want?

And I'm still stuck on the idea of pure decentralization. An actual wallet-to-wallet transaction. I don't care what I buy: pesos or empanadas or a late night glass of wine. I just want to cut out the middleman. Decentralized. Permissionless. Trustless.

I mean technically, yes, it's permissionless. No one can stop me from submitting a transaction to a street vendor. I can sign it. It'll show up on a block explorer.

But I can't force the street vendor to accept my transaction and give me empanadas. You can't route around human consent.

I feel stupid explaining how confused I feel about all this, so instead, I try to be amusing by telling them the story of buying candy with BCH.

An Argentine with a cone holding two identical scoops of pink-orange ice cream explains to me that to trade stablecoins for pesos, you need a friend who knows a friend. "That's how it works in Buenos Aires."

Someone murmurs cuevas in the background. He nods, that's what he's talking about. Blackmarket traders. They no longer operate in actual caves, I've read, just secret spaces. Tiny, nondescript back offices, hidden behind the magazine racks inside a news kiosk, in the back of a lingerie shop, or up a dodgy elevator in an old building. It's exactly what I am wondering about. It sounds scary.

I also wonder: What kind of lunatic gets two scoops of ice cream and then only chooses one flavor? He tells me that it's all pomelo, grapefruit, and that he has no regrets.

"So," I say, trying to look cool about asking the Pomelo-loving-man half my age for underground stablecoin hookups in an ice cream shop. "Do you have a friend?"

"I do."

And just like that, I have a way forward. I will either make good on my challenge or get murdered in a Buenos Aires back alley. Luckily, I don't have enough crypto to be worth murdering, which even the most greedy bad guy can guess from my faded jeans and sweat-shop t-shirts that I've been hand-washing in the sink.

I find Pomelo again before the event ends, refusing to risk his disappearing into the shadows of Subte Línea D. I hand him a business card. "It has my email address," I explain.

He looks at me like I just gave him a fax number. "Don't you have Telegram?"

Of course I do, yes, and he promises to add me as a contact.

It's not a big deal though, Pomelo warns me. It sounds like it's pretty shady but really it isn't.

"I just want to be able to say that I've done it," I tell him. I promise that I'm not expecting anything cloak and dagger.

He'll be in touch, he says.

I try not to show how excited I am.

The following day is Pride and Avenida de Mayo is a glorious chaos of queer, cocktails, drums, glitter and screaming. I bounce through the crowds all afternoon, sipping Fernet and Coke and trying to pretend like it doesn't taste like cough syrup.

Later, walking back through Microcentro on a piece of sidewalk just wide enough for one polite person, I feel something brush the top of my head. I stop, look up, look back, reach into my hair like a chimp checking for lice.

Two men and a woman, walking tightly together, pass me. As they do, the woman says something low and quick in Spanish, too fast to understand, too deliberate to ignore. I think she's telling what's in my hair and I'm mostly hoping that it isn't bird shit. But I'm also thrown. She's not smiling. She's not trying to be helpful.

I pat my head a bit more, finding nothing. As I continue, I see the same trio standing in a doorway, talking. As I pass, they fall in behind me again. I'm still wondering what the woman said to me, and why.

It's not until I am back in my room that I realise my back pocket is empty. I have been pickpocketed.

They stole my pink keyboard.

—

Up next is Part Five: Going Bankless (From tourist shop hack to cueva contact)