Cryptocurrencies should be considered their own asset class and not lumped together with gold, according to San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly. "Crypto is a form of asset, but it's a very complicated one, and I think we have to unpack what that means and get our terminology straight," Daly said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. "Crypto can be a currency. It could be a medium of exchange, a unit of account. Cryptos often exhibit characteristics like gold, but I don't think they're quite the same." Daly's comments come across as somewhat different from recent remarks made by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who has said that "people are using bitcoin as a speculative asset. It's essentially a substitute for gold. It's a digital, scarce substitute for gold." Powell added that bitcoin is "not a substitute for the dollar." Daly said that cryptocurrencies have to earn their way into being used more broadly in the economy before they can be considered a currency. "Currencies don't just get to be valuable because there's high demand for them," Daly said. "They get their value from their macroeconomic circumstances—how fast the economy is growing in the place where that currency is used. That's one of the properties of a currency."

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