Being in the middle of the crypto scandal that’s ensnared the president of one of South America’s biggest countries wasn’t the first time that members of the Davis family found themselves at the center of controversy.
Long before Hayden Davis got Argentine President Javier Milei to promote a memecoin, his father told tales of counterfeiting checks and assuming fake identities as a young man, eventually ending up in prison. Further up the family tree, the tales get even wilder: Hayden’s grandfather was murdered by followers of his great-grandfather, the head of a polygamist cult that practiced blood sacrifice.
Hayden is the 28-year-old chief executive officer of Kelsier Ventures, an obscure investment firm he runs with his brother Gideon, 25, and father Tom, 54. The company and Hayden’s memecoin Libra are at the heart of a scandal that’s rattled investors in Argentina after Milei promoted the token with the promise it would raise money for small businesses in the nation.
Within an hour of Libra’s Valentine’s Day launch, investors had pushed the token’s market value above $4 billion as they rushed to buy following a social media post by Milei. But Libra’s price collapsed minutes later, leaving more than 80% of its buyers nursing estimated losses totaling $251 million. As the token sank, Milei quickly deleted his social media post supporting it, later stating he hadn’t intended to persuade people to buy it in the first place.
Around $100 million was cashed out within minutes of Libra’s debut by so-called snipers, a crypto term for bots or insiders who jump in to take profits soon after token launches. Most of that money was transferred to wallets owned by Kelsier Ventures, blockchain analysis by Arkham Intelligence shows. Dressed in a $795 black Moncler hoodie, Hayden said in a Feb. 16 video that the firm removed the money from the token’s liquidity pools in a bid to protect it from dying out.
Milei has denied any wrongdoing and says he received no financial benefit from Libra. Hayden’s current whereabouts are unknown, and a variety of efforts to reach him, his family and Kelsier Ventures for comment were unsuccessful. The Davis family’s footprint has largely disappeared from the internet: social-media accounts have been deleted, details from Kelsier’s website have been removed, and a family podcast is no longer available online.
In the days after Libra’s failure, as Milei was engulfed in the first major scandal of his presidency, Hayden spoke to a YouTube personality.
“It’s a memecoin. If you’re turbo-nuking your whole portfolio into a memecoin, like, not financial advice, but it’s foolish,” he said in a Feb. 17 interview with Coffeezilla.
Memecoins are volatile cryptocurrencies that typically have no underlying business or involve any innovation. They are often subject to pump-and-dump schemes.
When asked whether he thought his actions represented insider trading, Hayden told an interviewer no such thing existed in the world of memecoins. “Every memecoin I’ve ever known, invested in, or been a part of, the people that benefit the most are the people that structure the deal,” he said in the Coffeezilla interview. Calling the entire event a “colossal nightmare,” he added: “This isn’t a scam. This is a plan gone wrong at a presidential level.”
Family history
In descriptions of the Davis family’s childhood by Hayden and his brother Gideon in other podcasts, a portrait of a wholesome upbringing is painted.
His parents raised their seven children in a 6,000-square-foot house in Colorado, where his dad Tom worked as a minister and head of a Christian charity for several years. Tom also wrote five books, according to his sons, explored gold mining in Guyana and spent time undercover in Russia to research and combat sex trafficking. He later hawked health supplements under a multilevel marketing company. The family traveled often, including more than 50 visits to Russia, where the couple adopted two of their children.
Yet before he started a family — and later became chairman of Kelsier Ventures — Tom had described his younger years as checkered with crime, drug abuse and stints in jail. “I used to counterfeit everything on the planet,” he said on an episode of his family’s podcast, recorded in 2022 but removed from the internet this month. “I did a lot of illegal substances. I even used to joke that I would do any drug that didn’t do me first.”
In his late teens, Tom worked with a group that used other people’s identities to “create money out of thin air,” he recalled in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s 700 Club. After attending Bible school to turn his life around, his past caught up with him.
“I ended up going to my attorney’s office and sat down with two FBI officers,” he told the 700 Club. “I told them the whole picture. They looked at me and said, ‘We’ve never seen anybody as honest as you are about this.’ I had just incriminated myself. I just sentenced myself to 60, 70 years in a federal penitentiary.” However, he ended up serving about a year in prison, according to the 700 Club.
His wife, Emily, grappled with her own childhood trauma. She was born into the Church of the First Born of the Lamb of God in Mexico, a polygamist Mormon fundamentalist group led by her grandfather Ervil Morell LeBaron, who had 13 wives and more than 60 children in his lifetime. Among other forms of worship, the group practiced a type of blood sacrifice, leading to the murders of both opponents and followers of LeBaron’s teachings.
“My grandfather taught this tenet that if you didn’t shed the blood of other people who had committed these unpardonable sins, then those people who committed the sins wouldn’t go to heaven,” Emily said on the family’s podcast in 2021. When LeBaron died in prison in 1981, he gave his followers a list of people to kill — including Emily’s father, Mark Chynoweth, who had escaped the group with his wife and six children.
Chynoweth was shot inside a repair shop in Houston in 1988, at the exact time that two other former members of the sect were killed. Emily’s mother took her own life in the months after her husband’s death. Emily and her sister Lisa described their experiences in the ABC News documentary “Daughters of the Cult” last year.
For the kids of the Davis family, life was brighter. In 2015 the family moved to Barcelona, Spain. A talent for soccer emerged, with both Hayden and Gideon playing for college teams in the U.S. Gideon, now Kelsier’s chief operating officer, was called up several times by the U.S. men’s youth national team. One of the younger brothers, Hudson, signed a two-year deal in 2023 to play for Spanish soccer team Girona FC, according to Transfermarkt.
“I’m the first generation out of a long line of darkness,” Gideon told the Unscripted Arena podcast last year.
Meeting Milei
Tom was the first in the family to take an interest in crypto soon after the family arrived in Spain. Later, when the pandemic hit the family’s leadership business, he turned his attention to Dubai, where he gained residency and began working on Kelsier Ventures with Hayden.
Prior to Libra, Kelsier Ventures was relatively unknown outside of memecoin circles, according to interviews with more than a dozen crypto executives and experts. The company started out advising on marketing strategies for nonfungible-token projects, transitioning to a focus on cryptocurrencies and blockchain clients in 2022.
One of the firms Kelsier backed, Bitcoin exchange Saturn, said on Feb. 19 that it intended to refund Kelsier’s investment in the company. A spokesperson for Cube Exchange said it had terminated its relationship with Kelsier in November, citing “concerns around how they operated.” Ben Chow, co-founder of decentralized crypto exchange Meteora, stepped down from his role at the top of one the biggest memecoin trading venues following the Argentina fallout, having had his own connections to Kelsier revealed in a leaked call.
Libra was billed as being part of Project Viva La Libertad, an initiative to finance private ventures in Argentina using blockchain technology. Exactly when or who devised the project remains unclear, with Milei, Hayden and a blockchain firm called KIP Protocol all presenting conflicting accounts.
An Argentine federal prosecutor opened an investigation into Libra, naming Davis and Milei among several people involved in the case. The investigation so far doesn’t include the president’s sister and top adviser, Karina Milei, who met at the official residence outside Buenos Aires with an Argentine crypto entrepreneur who introduced Davis to President Milei.
Libra wasn’t Kelsier’s first experience with high-profile memecoin launches. Kelsier had sniped some profit from the launch of U.S. First Lady Melania Trump’s memecoin in January, Hayden said, after gathering information from the team behind her token beforehand. The company was also working with popular memecoin Bonk on a “Latin America launch extension plan,” Gideon said in November, though a Bonk team member later said that was inaccurate.
Kelsier now holds about $110 million in assets from the Libra launch, Hayden told Coffeezilla. An analysis of Kelsier’s wallets by Arkham Intelligence shows it holds around $88 million in the stablecoin USDC and the Solana cryptocurrency, and $94 million in Libra tokens. The company said it wants to return those funds to those who lost money, except it’s not sure how to do so. Animoca Brands, a major crypto investor that has worked with Kelsier in the past, proposed creating a decentralized organization to help distribute the money.
Yet before he went dark, Hayden made his thoughts on the crypto market clear to an interviewer.
“Even at the top, all of it is extractive to some degree or a zero sum game. None of it has value,” Hayden told Coffeezilla. “The point of being here is the attempt for it not to be one day, which is going to require huge amounts of progress to get there.”
Bloomberg’s Muyao Shen, Olga Kharif, Suvashree Ghosh and Patrick Gillespie contributed.