The Current - Trump to host who’s-who of the crypto world at White House

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

U.S. President Donald Trump launched his own cryptocurrency meme coin, $TRUMP, in January, and this week he’s hosting the White House's first-ever cryptocurrency summit. The CBC’s Nora Young explains why the president's interest in crypto — including plans to create a national reserve of the digital currency — is setting off alarms.

What do you see when you look around? Lively cities, growing neighborhoods, things that connect us. For those into skilled trades, it's a world they helped create. Discover more than 300 careers, paid apprenticeships, and the unmatched feeling of saying, I made that. Learn more at Canada.ca slash skilled trades. A message from the government of Canada. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is the current podcast. The United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world. If crypto is going to define the

future, I want to be mined, minted and made in the USA. It's going to be. It's not going to be made anywhere else. Donald Trump loves crypto. The president has not only launched his own Trump coin, but is also making the digital currency a big part of his new administration. Tomorrow, the White House is hosting its first ever crypto summit. This event will bring together the who's who of the crypto world. The CBC's Nora Young is with the Visual Investigations Unit

and has been following the story and is with me in studio now. Nora, good morning. Morning, Matt. What is this crypto summit that is happening tomorrow at the White House? There's a lot going on in the world. There is a lot going on, busy. So this is the first time the White House. There's a lot going on in the world. There is a lot going on, busy. So this is the first time the White House has hosted,

essentially, a conference for the cryptocurrency industry. But it's focused on bringing together Trump and his crypto team, which includes the crypto czar, David Sachs, who's chairing it, together with the CEOs of some of the biggest players in the crypto world, somewhere around 20 of those people, to look at the state of the industry, the regulatory framework, and the future of crypto crypto and what it might look like under this

administration. Of course, the backdrop of this, as you pointed out, is what looks like this dramatic shift in policy toward crypto from this administration. Like recall that Trump's called himself the first crypto president. So definitely a shift in tone. He says the United States will be the Bitcoin superpower of the world. Exactly. And he has announced the creation of this crypto reserve fund.

What is that? Yeah. So the rumor is they're going to sort of officially launch this at the summit, though it's kind of been floated and talked up earlier this week. So if it goes forward, the idea is for the U S to maintain a strategic crypto reserve. So he named five of the many, many current

cryptocurrencies out there to start Ethereum and Bitcoin, and then three lesser known ones. So strategic reserve is usually maintained by a country for something like, you know, critical minerals, like something that have a vital role in the economy. We have maple syrup here.

The strategic reserve of maple syrup. Exactly, right? You know, in case there's disruptions in the supply chain or I don't know, something like a trade war say, but, uh, it's a bit hard to see how cryptocurrency does something that you couldn't do with just having money basically, right? So what does the reaction been to the reserve

fund? Yeah, I mean, certainly some excitement, uh, in some quarters, but I was interested in this. Like it hasn't been met entirely positively even within the crypto industry. According to the financial times, uh, after initial flurry of activity and this kind of crypto rally at the beginning of the week,

that was followed by a bit of a slump. And there've been questions and some concerns from within the industry, especially around things like why these particular crypto currencies, especially the smaller ones that might be seen as a bit more risky. Um, and there's also been very little detail about how this would actually be funded.

So for example, even within the Republican party, some Republicans have questioned whether this is basically a waste of taxpayer money. This is interesting because people are trying to figure this out. I mean, and unwrap their head around what exactly this means for the United States in this time, in this economic time.

Exactly. And there is this question about, you know, do they want to be taking on this kind of extra risk? But of course I'm not a financial person, so I needed some expertise in this economic time. Exactly. And there is this question about, you know, do they want to be taking on this kind of extra risk, but of course I'm not a financial person, so I needed some expertise in this. And I talked to Stephen Cicchetti, he is the Rosen family chair in international finance at the Brandeis International Business School.

And he's been highly skeptical. The analogy I would use is imagine that you have a mortgage and maybe you're having a little trouble making the payments. Would you borrow more and invest in risky assets in the hopes that maybe these things that you buy, maybe they're stocks, maybe they're cryptocurrencies, whatever they are, that they're going to gain in value and relieve this debt burden a little bit, make it easier for you to make the payments. That makes no sense. It makes no sense. Yeah, he points out that for a country that has a huge amount of debt, why would you be

borrowing more in order to make investments in something as potentially volatile as crypto? The crypto president has also pushed to change regulation around cryptocurrency. What has that looked like thus far? Yeah, I mean, the Biden administration been looking for some time at bringing in more regulation in crypto, but now we're seeing at the same time as you have this interest from government, this move to back off of regulation. And where we're seeing that most clearly is in the role of the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission. So last week, the SEC agreed to press pause on a high profile investigation into a controversial crypto entrepreneur. And

before that, they dropped a high profile case against Coinbase, which as you know, is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US. And one of the things that the SEC has been pursuing is to try and get crypto treated like other securities, which means they'd be subject to the same types of regulations as other securities on the market. But you talked about the volatility.

I mean, beyond that, maybe that is the risk. What are the risks of pulling back on regulation here? Yeah, I mean, reasonable people can disagree on what constitutes appropriate regulation, right? Can you have guardrails against fraud, but still be fine about letting people do what they want, invest however they want. Um, but obviously there's certainly concerns

that people might lose their shirts. And it's, it's not necessarily that everyone in the sector wants a totally unregulated industry. And this surprised me, but it makes sense. Steven Cicchetti pointed out that a lot of people he hears from within the sector want the legitimacy that could come with regulating out fraudsters. What is going on here? Why is he so interested in this? Because he, Donald Trump, and the first lady, Melania Trump, launched their own crypto coins. As you mentioned, there's a crypto

czar. People love the word czar. What is going on here? Yeah. I'm thinking of becoming the photocopies are around CBC actually. We'll get that title approved. Certainly. No, but to your point, it's, it's just back in

2021, Trump called it a scam against the dollar, right? Um, but he's gone all in saying he's going to be the first crypto president, et cetera, et cetera. And of course there are a lot of pro crypto people in the administration now, including most obviously Elon Elon Musk. Stephen Chiquetti takes a more critical tone of all this. He believes the reserve, the critical reserve in particular, is a way to help Trump's backers.

A person like that who is really into making business transactions is going to do it for money. So presumably he did that for the support of the crypto industry and one of the important things that a crypto reserve does is that it allows the people who have large crypto assets in their portfolios to sell them at high prices. Have there been concerns around conflict of interest here? I mean when the the trump coin trump coins were launched everybody was wondering who was making the money. I mean, even at the most straightforward level, it's a confident disposition to both have your own crypto at the same time as you're promoting the

future of cryptocurrency and signaling a pro crypto direction in your administration. Um, Trump is also involved in something called world Liberty financial, which is a crypto project and a leading investor in that project is the crypto entrepreneur I mentioned before that the SEC has just suspended investigating. So regardless of whether there's anything actually wrong being done here, it's certainly a conflict of interest position to stand to gain financially from a

particular type of investment that you're promoting politically under ordinary circumstances. I don't think we would need to be talking about this. Are these ordinary circumstances? No, these are ordinary circumstances. I don't think we would need to be talking about. Are these ordinary circumstances? No, they're not ordinary circumstances, right? There is a summit that is happening tomorrow. What are you going to be watching for coming out of that summit?

Yeah, I mean, I do think, you know, crypto is here to stay and we should be publicly discussing what appropriate regulation looks like so that you can have a healthy market, but that potentially people are not losing their shirts or you reign in the fraudsters. So I think that aspect is important. And I think actually just hearing about

what the perspective of the big players in the crypto industry is, is important. We were talking yesterday in this program, this is something different, but it's interesting. We were talking yesterday in the program about, speaking of ordinary times, questions around the United States and its role in intelligence sharing and spy agencies

and the sort of Five Eyes spy network. You have been, and this is a question that came up in our conversation yesterday, you've been following what's going on at the US Department of Defense and its cyber operations in Russia in particular. What do we know about this? I'm going to do my best to keep us out of the weeds here, Matt. Okay. Okay.

There's been this flurry of stories over the last kind of week or so from Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, and on and on, suggesting that the Trump administration has been pulling back from addressing Russia as a cybersecurity threat, which is obviously potentially very concerning because it is a cybersecurity threat. The most high profile of these is that it was initially reported that the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, ordered Cyber Command, which is the part of the Pentagon that is responsible for cybersecurity, to halt offensive cyber operations against Russia, right? So potentially very concerning.

Separately, there was this recent case in the UN where the US specifically named China and Iran as cybersecurity threats, but omitted naming Russia, which is virtually always talked about as a cybersecurity threat. But as things unfolded over the course of the week, it actually seems like things are more nuanced than that.

And it's probably too early to be freaking out about this move. But there are concerns in the security community right now about this. Yeah, absolutely. And I talked to Kim Zetter about this. She's a security journalist and is the mind behind Zero Day, which tracks details about what

the US is up to when it comes to cybersecurity. And she's skeptical about this particular thing, which is that these are major changes. She thinks it has more to do with negotiations with Russia over the war in Ukraine. And she points out that it's sort of standard procedure with the US when they're in the middle of negotiations with another country that

essentially not to tick anybody off, right? To sort of back off these sensitive kinds of topics. Um, so she doesn't think there's that much to do with this particular issue that they're really backing off on it, but she is though worried about cuts to the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency and the impacts that that might have. They don't really understand who is a significant player and who may be a minor player, they're just sort of slashing across the board. That's a concern is that you eliminate people whose job it is to be doing active monitoring of networks, whose job it is to actively notify agencies to fight back, to

defend, to disable attacks. When you start eliminating those people, then you really are opening the door to adversaries and not just adversaries from Russia. So you start to have you know this wholesale cutting of jobs but in this incredibly sensitive area you know right at the time where we're seeing this growth in ransomware we're seeing potential cyber securities the threat to infrastructure and on and on. That's unsettling. Yes. Nora. That's my job Matt. The unsettling czar, Nora Young, is with the CBC's Visual Investigations Unit. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Thank you.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.