JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — Federal Reserve Governor Chris Waller preached that there is “nothing scary” about digital asset innovations, during a speech in Jackson Hole on Wednesday — the second high-ranking Fed official to praise the sector this week.
“There is nothing to be afraid of when thinking about smart contracts, tokenization or distributed ledgers,” he said at the SALT conference. “Leveraging innovative technology to build new payment services is not a new story.”
Waller, who is reportedly a top pick for next chair of the Federal Reserve, has long been a supporter of the industry and stablecoins.
Appointed by President Donald Trump in 2020, Waller said that some of the top innovations have been “vilified” in the past few years because they were tied to digital assets.
“Those are just technologies, why are they so bad?” he said. “If they lead to more useful and interesting ways to do things, then we should be looking at and adopting it too.”
Waller said the Fed is looking at how to tokenize things and how to use smart contracts, as well as distributed ledgers.
“We may never go that route as a central bank but there’s no reason we don’t explore to see what happens,” he said.
Waller spoke a day after Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman, who similarly said the industry should be treated better by banks and bank regulators and praised tokenization.
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