Kontigo was a "benefited startup" under a criminal system. Its support and growth were probably triggered by major backing from within the Venezuelan government. After January 3, everything started to fall apart due to something very simple: the incentives died. The government is being monitored and tutored by the United States, as has been stated multiple times, and the United States will have to approve or deny a large part of the funds. Its main activity.. beyond Venezuela being its principal market (IT IS ITS PRINCIPAL MARKET; BASICALLY NO ONE USES THIS APP OUTSIDE OF VENEZUELA) consisted of trying to deceive large venture capital firms by posing as an "international" application, when it never was one. In reality, its core operation benefited major capital holders inside the State, under a very simple cycle. Kontigo received dollars or stablecoins at the BCV (Venezuela Central Bank) official rate (under exchange/capital controls and non-accesible for the regular ppl). These were liquidated into stablecoins (USDT or, more recently, DAI), as that has been the dynamic of the Venezuelan state since the intensification of sanctions. Then, Kontigo operators would go to traditional P2P markets and convert those stablecoins at black-market dollar rates. This has been the mechanism that has bled billions of dollars out of Venezuela for more than 20 years. The business was simple: With 363,000 bolívares (local currency) I get 1,000 dollars from the Central Bank. On Binance P2P or any other platform, I exchange those 1,000 dollars for 526,000 bolívares (current rate; at one point it reached over 700,000 bolívares). Rinse and repeat. Applications that tried to operate a legal business model outside of this scheme were persecuted and forced to shut down their operations in Venezuela (El Dorado is a clear example) Having almost 100% Spanish-speaking users with money on your platform in a country where the vast majority of the population does not speak English, you don't issue a statement in English. That statement is not aimed at your users; it is aimed at the VCs who fell into a dangerous trap (YC, Coinbase Ventures). In a normal country, with genuinely functional startups and not under a criminal narco-state that, until recently, attacked U.S. interests on a daily basis, applications like this are unviable. Kontigo is not "evaluating" anything; they are simply trying to cover their backs so that, at some point, they can close definitively. It is a passive winding down, similar to what happens with "blockchains" that received heavy VC funding and, once their vesting period ends, slowly turn into deadchains until they disappear.

The Latin American Center for Cryptoculture Research expresses its solidarity with all the Chilean people during the wildfires they are suffering right now.