Manuel Adorni, Argentina’s cabinet chief and President Javier Milei’s longtime spokesman, has a tidy explanation for the roughly $513,000 he kept off the books for years. He says bitcoin gains explain a half-million dollars he hid. But his own trades, past videos and filings tell a different story.
“In 2013 I entered the Bitcoin world. Then in 2014, I started to invest heavily (…) and between 2014 and 2018 we significantly profited. We invested approximately $200,000 and we made around $300,000,” Adorni told La Nación. This money, he amassed with his wife, wasn’t disclosed until now.
Adorni has been investigated for illicit enrichment since late March. He needs to prove the source of funds and properties that weren’t reflected in his previous financial disclosure statements. As reported by the Financial Times, on June 10, Adorni and his wife had saved “under the table, like all Argentines,” and their early crypto trades were made way before he entered government. He filed amended asset declarations the same evening, hours after a federal investigation into alleged illicit enrichment by the Anti-Corruption Office and the Revenue and Customs Control Agency closed in.
Bitcoin can mint that kind of money. The issue is the records he pointed to don’t match the story he told.
Adorni recited specific trades on air. In one wallet, he said, he bought 13 bitcoin in August 2017 at $3,356 each, added two more later that year, then sold 10 in March 2018 and the rest within weeks. Blockworks’ data expert, Fernando Molina unveiled a wallet that fits the description. The blockchain confirms its shape: about 15 bitcoin in across three deposits in 2017, 15 bitcoin out in two transactions in 2018, the address now empty. By his own prices, it cleared close to $60,000.
That’s real money. But it’s also just a fraction of the $300,000 profit he described, and it sits entirely between 2017 and 2018. However, his Bitcoin tale started in 2014 and he mentioned that there are other wallets, but without any details.
Adorni’s Bitcoin Tale Inconsistencies
In a 2020 talk sponsored by the wallet app Lemon, still on YouTube, Adorni said he stumbled onto crypto “five or six years” earlier, when bitcoin traded near $6,000. Bitcoin first touched $6,000 in October 2017. By 2022 he was calling bitcoin too volatile and saying he preferred stablecoins.
His newest assets declaration adds a date that doesn’t fit either. The crypto he actually reported, held through cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance and Lemon, entered his accounts between 2021 and 2023 as local media reported. The biggest new line is roughly $513,000 in U.S.-dollar cash, logged as proceeds from the sale of assets, local outlet Ámbito reported.
Prosecutors are weighing the spending too. Federal judge Ariel Lijo and prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita are examining property, renovations and cash that ran past his public salary. In May, the architect who remodeled the family’s country house testified that Adorni paid him $245,000 in cash.
That single payment tops the position’s yearly salary.
Crypto And Mile’s Government: Here We Go Again
The case lands in a government already dogged by crypto doubts. Milei is a person of interest in the inquiry into LIBRA, the February 2025 memecoin he promoted on X that collapsed and cost buyers around $251 million. Argentina’s Chamber of Deputies reopened that probe in April.
One person threads the two scandals. Mauricio Novelli, the entrepreneur behind LIBRA, ran the investing courses where Adorni taught in 2022, and Adorni was among the officials in the room when Novelli brought his American partner, Hayden Davis, into the Casa Rosada for the LIBRA soirée.
Milei is standing by him and has said he won’t seek a resignation. Patricia Bullrich, who leads his Senate bloc, was sharper. “This is more than a mistake, this is an ethical omission,” she said as La Nación reported.
What Argentinian Bitcoin Enthusiasts Say
Adorni’s $BTC story doesn’t align with what Argentinian Bitcoin veterans experienced. Franco Amati, and early bitcoin adopter and enthusiast from Argentina, said that during the period Adorni mentioned as his heavy time into the digital assets realm (when his $200,000 investment took place) big buyings weren’t easy.
“Were there any Bitcoin purchase transactions in Argentina in 2014 for $100,000 (as Manuel Adorni claims)? Few, difficult to complete, and requiring multiple sellers to reach the total; but some do appear when reviewing old emails (this example was almost USD 95,000),” Amati posted on X with an screenshot of the mentioned email.
Another well known Argentinian $BTC early adopter and Bitcoin advocate at Roxom, Carlos Maslatón, also commented on Adorni’s bitcoin affair. Maslatón alleged that, at the time Adorni pointed to, he was part of Xapo Bank, one of the oldest exchanges and cryptocurrencies platforms, operating their Over-The-Counter desk. The majority of Xapo’s users came from Germany, England and France. Despite Argentinians making up over 80% of the operation, the South American country wasn’t among their most active markets.
“We can reconstruct, in detail, what Bitcoin was and how it worked in 2013-2015, the period Adorni invoked to justify the unjustifiable. Any Bitcoin activist in Argentina from those years can also describe similar things about their own circles,” Maslatón detailed on X.
Blockworks’ Molina also added an interesting fact. Adorni mentioned 2014 as the time he invested heavily in bitcoin, but the numbers registered in Bitcoin’s blockchain show that “only 2.86% (87,000 wallets) of all wallets (3 million) in 2014 held more than $10,000 worth of $BTC. 0.48% (14,000 wallets) held more than $56,000. The average $BTC holding in 2014 was approximately $2,378 USD or 4.22 $BTC.”
Adorni just disclosed details of one wallet, but he said he used multiple wallets to manage that amount. However, given Molina’s numbers and considering Amati and Malatón’s comments, the Argentinian bitcoin adoption landscape casts a significant shadow of doubt over Argentina’s cabinet chief’s Bitcoin tale.
After these new details, the prosecutors are even more concerned, and Adorni faces a deeper scrutiny.
