US Fed to Host Payments Innovation Conference on Crypto and AI

The Federal Reserve Board announced Wednesday it will host a conference on payments innovation on October 21, with a focus on emerging technologies in U.S. payment systems.

The event will bring together regulators, academics, and industry participants to discuss ways to “innovate and improve the payments system,” per the announcement.

“Innovation has been a constant in payments to meet the changing needs of consumers and businesses,” Federal Reserve Governor Christopher J. Waller said in a statement. 

The conference is positioned to bring together “ideas on how to improve the safety and efficiency of payments, and hearing from those helping to shape the future of payments,” Governor Waller added.

The event will feature panel discussions on the convergence of traditional and decentralized finance, new stablecoin use cases, the intersection of artificial intelligence and payments, and the tokenization of financial products and services.

It will be livestreamed on the Federal Reserve’s website, with further details to be announced. Decrypt has reached out to the central bank for further details.

The inclusion of stablecoins and tokenization under one conference table connects with how the Fed and regulators are viewing digital assets through the same policy lens as traditional payments.

It “raises the bar for global policy dialogue” and shows that “these instruments are no longer fringe experiments but core parts of the payments stack,” Jakob Kronbichler, co-founder and CEO of on-chain credit marketplace Clearpool, told Decrypt.

“The priority now is clarity: rules that recognize stablecoins as settlement assets and create consistent standards for tokenized credit and liquidity markets,” Kronbichler said, adding that clear, unified rules are needed for on-chain financing solutions to “scale without fragmentation.”

Asked about the role of AI in payments, Kronbichler said that the technology is “moving into the core of payments” through use cases such as fraud identification, credit assessment, and risk management.

“Regulators don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but they do need rules that make models explainable and testable, with clear governance and human oversight built in,” he said.

Last month, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission advanced its own “Crypto Sprint,” where it will assess custody, leveraged retail trading, and consumer protections. It is now in its public consultation phase, which runs through October 20.

The Fed’s October conference announcement follows a joint SEC and CFTC statement on Monday that sought to clarify how registered exchanges may list certain spot crypto products, including leveraged retail trades, under their Project Crypto and Crypto Sprint initiatives. 

The move, pitched as advancing regulatory clarity and market choice, comes just weeks before policy dialogues and pilots from the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank for International Settlements.