LETTER FROM BEIRUT
Mario Awad’s office has no storefront. On the heights of Byblos, a sign bearing the bitcoin logo indicates a modern residential building. It is from the parental suite of his apartment, with a view of the sea, that the 37-year-old Lebanese man manages his cryptocurrency business. Since the onset of the financial crisis in the fall of 2019, he has turned his costume jewelry stores into bitcoin agencies, and opened others across the country. Facing his bed, television screens display the prices of virtual currencies live. Buried in the couch, Mario Awad oversees transactions from his phone.
“In the early 2010s, only crazy people bought bitcoin in Lebanon; today, they are millionaires! For a year and a half, everyone has been into cryptocurrencies, even my butcher! », laughs Mario Awad, who launched with friends in 2017. Virtual currencies no longer attract only a small community of savvy people who share the libertarian philosophy behind their creation, or those motivated by the desire to be. Lebanon’s financial disaster, which saw the local currency lose 90% of its value against the dollar, and banks impose restrictions on the movement of capital, decided many Lebanese to use cryptocurrencies to transact and invest this what savings they have left.
The “trader” estimates that the country of 6 million inhabitants now has 70,000 cryptocurrency users. “Among my clients, I have political figures, members of the security forces, managers of large companies”, he continues, interrupted by a WhatsApp notification. He exchanges a few voice messages with a client of Furn El-Chebbak and with the saleswoman who runs her shop in this district of Beirut. “He deposited $1,000 at the store. I applied 2%-3% commission and transferred 980 USDC to him [un « stablecoin », une monnaie numérique indexée sur le dollar américain] on his wallet [portefeuille de monnaies virtuelles] », explains Mario Awad.
OTC transactions
The phone beeps constantly. It rings the doorbell. The security guard brings in two Lebanese men in their twenties who are studying in France and are using their holidays to invest $10,000 in cryptocurrencies, because “transactions are simpler here, and there is no tax”. “Every day, 10 to 50 people come, most for transactions of $100 to $1,000, some for $20,000 to $50,000”, believes Mario Awad. More rarely, he has operations of several hundreds of thousands of dollars, ” see more “, he said, evasively.
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