A crypto reporter struggled to make sense of Donald Trump's moves to create a strategic reserve of the digital currency.
The president signed an executive order to establish a strategic reserve of cryptocurrencies by using tokens already owned by the government ahead of a meeting with crypto founders and investors at the White House, and Axios correspondent Brady Dale set about explaining the situation.
"I think it's going to be kind of a cheerleading moment, you know, it's the first time that the White House has been enthusiastic about this nascent and somewhat controversial industry, so I think there'll be a lot of that," Dale said. "I mean, it's the Trump administration, so I expect some kind of big reveal today, you know, they always like to have TV. The digital asset announcement, that was yesterday's news. It's old news, so I'm betting there will be something in some other corner of policy that will happen today at the summit, but who knows what – I don't know what."
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CNN's Kate Bolduan asked the reporter to explain what exactly a cryptocurrency exchange actually was, and he gave it a shot.
"Well, so that's the big question, right?" Dale said. "Like, if it's a strategic reserve, that implies it's a reserve for something, and we we don't know what that something is, you know."
Bolduan broke in to offer a comparison to the petroleum reserve, an emergency stockpile of crude oil that can be tapped when prices creep too high or during natural disasters, and she asked Dale to describe what a crypto emergency might be.
"I don't know," he admitted. "I mean, that's the thing – there's no answer. I mean, I think probably what the administration will say is this is a way of bolstering an industry that's become very strong in the United States, and, you know, that's a decent argument. We've also heard other politicians argue that by holding on to bitcoin, it'll go way up in value and we could sell it later and pay off a lot of debt – also a fine argument. But, like, we we've got a giant pile of gold [at Fort Knox] that we're not doing anything with and that we don't actually need, and we haven't done that, either."
"So, yeah, that's the big question for me is, if there's if this is strategic, what is the strategy?" Dale added. "What's the point? We still we still don't know that."
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