The tongue-in-cheek origins of Ñeripeso, Uruguay’s most beloved cryptocurrency

The buzziest new cryptocurrency in Latin America, Ñeripeso, is not a flashy project backed by international investors set on tackling the region’s most pressing financial problems. It’s a token with an ironic name that friends in Uruguay half-jokingly minted a few months ago. 

Now locals can’t get enough of it. 

Since launching on May 20, Ñeripeso ($NIERI) has unexpectedly caused a stir in Uruguay, the tiny South American country of just about 3.5 million people. More than 5,400 users have joined the community’s Discord server. Today 2,192 wallet addresses hold ñeripesos, and the cryptocurrency has a total supply of 18.9 billion. Nearly 527 million ñeripesos are in circulation. 

What is a ñeripeso? Technically, it’s a token that runs on Binance Smart Chain. People are using it as a form of payment for a variety of goods and services, ranging from memes to physical items like food and furniture. 

However, the most interesting thing about the ñeripeso is not that it runs on a blockchain. It is the community that has quickly formed around it and the way its own users determine its value.

Origin story

“The idea of Ñeripeso was almost a joke,” says Juan Grunwaldt, one of the project’s founders. He aimed to invite people to start exploring cryptocurrencies and play with their value without losing real money.

The decision to call this cryptocurrency “Ñeripeso” is twofold, Grunwaldt explains. For one, “ñeri” is a term some people use in Uruguay (and neighboring Argentina) to signal a close friendship based on trust — and trust is a core element of Ñeripeso. After all, if you give someone in the community ñeripesos in exchange for a good or service — whether it be a meme or a jar of jam —you’re trusting that the other person will deliver. 

But there’s also another, more tongue-in-cheek meaning behind the name Ñeripeso, Grunwaldt explains. Certain slang words like ñeri — just like cryptocurrencies — have developed somewhat of a bad rap for glorifying criminal activity, even though people can use them in perfectly innocent ways. This parallel helps explain the coin’s logo, which features a gold chain encircling a block-letter N with a baseball cap floating overhead.

It’s hard to say how, exactly, Ñeripeso took off and became so popular in just a few months. According to Grunwaldt, there wasn’t one important actor driving it. Instead, an organic “series of coincidences” along with some media attention in Uruguay helped get it off the ground. 

The first transaction was Grunwaldt paying a friend to give him a tattoo of the Ñeripeso hat with “$NIERI” written underneath, followed by people exchanging a variety of things on Discord. He thinks Ñeripeso took off not because it was particularly special on its own, but because people were craving a change in the economic system.

One important aspect of the Ñeripeso community is the language. Many crypto resources, whether it be news articles like this one or online forums, tend to provide information in English. For some, this can be an extra barrier to learning about an already complicated topic. So, discussions on the Discord group happen in Spanish — particularly the local rioplatense variety.

By design, a ñeripeso is not something you can buy on an exchange with fiat currency like U.S. dollars or Uruguayan pesos. To get a balance, you have to provide something of value to the community. That’s not too hard. You could, for example, make art (ñart) or memes (ñemes) in exchange for ñeripesos. The community also seems happy to gift tokens to new members to get started. 

The number of ñeripesos you’d pay for any particular good or service can vary wildly depending on who’s involved, with people sometimes pushing up the value of silly items just for fun. Users — known as ñeris — discuss these transactions on Discord. Here, they also help each other troubleshoot technical issues like setting up MetaMask and provide information about special events like auctions. 

While some might argue that the word “ñeri” implies sketchiness, the Discord community seems to be a place full of overwhelmingly friendly, unpretentious people having fun and helping each other out. New members have to abide by terms and conditions, which rule out discrimination and selling pirated art among other things. Moderators even reach out to new members with a personal greeting.

“The community is really open to new members, there’s always support and people active all day for whatever [you need],” a Ñeripeso user named Esteban told The Block.

A true medium of exchange

It’s because of this community that ñeripesos have any value. “Currencies are nothing if there are no humans exchanging them,” says Grunwaldt.

Besides Discord, there's also the so-called ñerimercado online store, which looks like a mix between eBay and the popular e-commerce site Mercado Libre. Recent auction items include watches, 1950s magazines, vegan hamburgers, a U.S. $50 bill, a pool stick and a seemingly ancient laptop that went for 420 ñeripesos.

One of the most beloved items among ñeris is a homemade jam known as ñermelada, which is a play on the Spanish word “mermelada.” One of the members makes the jams using vegetables from their farm, which can go between about 15.000 - 100.000 ñeripesos, according to a user named Luis.

Another ñeripeso fan, Diego, claims he’s managed to deck out almost his entire room with secondhand items purchased with the cryptocurrency. Instead of heading to the store, he used the community to source a clothing cabinet, bed frame, nightstand, “puff” chair and desk chair, along with audio equipment, books and a netbook computer. “No conventional currency — all ñeripesos,” Diego confirmed.

The way ñeripesos are valued is also unconventional.

A good example is the café at the Cinemateca’s movie theater in Montevideo, which sells coffee in exchange for ñeripesos. Until a few days ago, a computer determined the price of coffee by randomly picking a number of ñeripesos within a certain range. When we chatted later, Grunwaldt said community members had decided to set the price at $4,420 ñeripesos. Who knows when it will change again.

To keep interest in ñeripeso fresh, the community sometimes auctions off special items. Members recently bid on a special edition of the iconic Uruguayan soda brand called Nix for 187,725 ñeripesos — complete with Ñeripeso’s cheeky branding elements of a gold chain and baseball cap. 

Community members have also won drones, laptops and smartwatches, Luis said. Some people have also auctioned off Binance coin (the “gas” needed to run Binance Smart Chain transactions) and USDT, according to Luis. However, the idea is that Ñeripeso users can earn these items just by doing good deeds in the community without needing to spend a dime of fiat currency.

Ñext steps

According to Grunwaldt, “the real value” of the Ñeripeso is its community. 

The organic nature and friendliness of the Ñeripeso community seems distinctly Uruguayan. Montevideo has to be one of the most laid-back and down-to-earth capitals in the world, where touches like vintage Volvos, Art Deco architecture and bustling markets offer a welcome contrast to modern amenities like free wifi hotspots. 

Cryptocurrencies haven’t taken off as much in Uruguay as in neighboring Argentina, where unpredictable inflation has provided a clearer use case for public use. However, people are increasingly curious about them.

Grunwaldt says that Uruguay is a place where experiments like Ñeripeso can flourish for a few reasons. For one, it’s a relatively small country where everyone seems to know one another. In addition, it has high internet penetration and a general civic consciousness among residents.

The unexpected popularity of this lighthearted currency has brought Grunwaldt some local fame, thanks to several media interviews and articles about the project. However, he says that his current role in maintaining the cryptocurrency isn’t exactly clear, and if everything goes well he shouldn’t have one at all. He adds that he has spent the last few months working to organize people, help form necessary teams, find common objectives and convince people that there's value in change.

“I think the most important thing to say about me is that I’m nobody, I don’t know anything,” said Grunwaldt when asked to describe himself and relation to crypto.  “To be honest, I have a completely different world.” He said he’s a writer who works for the nonprofit film association Cinemateca Uruguaya in Montevideo, which helped explain the poster for a Jean-Luc Godard movie peeking from the corner of his background during a video interview. 

Still, Grunwaldt has a view on where the cryptocurrency should go from here — and says the community will have a key role in making big decisions going forward. Of the ñeripesos in circulation today, 12 wallets hold about 30 million ñeripesos for paying incentives to the community.  What kind of incentives? Grunwaldt showed me one via WhatsApp — a little doll made out of thread with its arms open for a hug, complete with a little chain necklace and “N” shirt.

Also, one wallet holds half of all Ñeripeso tokens, which the community will decide what to do with in the future. Grunwaldt says the users will agree on how to circulate the rest of the tokens in stages.

In Grunwaldt's view, the next step for Ñeripeso should be thinking about how to evolve the technology. He picked Binance as an affordable alternative to Ethereum for getting the project off the ground. But now the community is considering changing to a different blockchain and even creating a DAO.

Some community members are studying alternatives like Polygon and Solana. Others have floated the idea that currency could run on a decentralized blockchain whose network would be based in Uruguay, with one computer in each of the country’s 19 departments.

But the point of Ñeripeso is not to get hung up on which blockchain or token is the best. It’s to think about how communities can create economic systems in the future that are more equal and just than those we have now, Grunwaldt says. In his opinion, cryptocurrencies are just the tip of the iceberg for showing us how to get there.