This episode of Markets Daily is sponsored by Cracken.

It's Sunday, August 27th, 2023, and this is Markets Daily from CoinDesk. Hi, I'm Michelle

Muso here with your featured story. On today's show, we're taking a look at the U.S. Federal

Reserve's launch of FedNow.

As always, just a reminder,

CoinDisc is a news source and does not provide investment advice.

Today's piece comes from Paul Brody, global blockchain leader for Ernst & Young.

We'll be using Wondercraft AI to read the story.

The piece is titled, Fed Now is a reminder that payments aren't crypto's differentiator.

Payments, especially those across borders, are often touted as a key use case and value proposition for the blockchain industry. Unfortunately, a look at both the technology, competition, and regulatory environment doesn't really support that idea.

And the launch of Fed now by the Federal Reserve in late July is a good occasion to take a look at why, for most people and companies,

the value proposition of using crypto or blockchains for basic payment services isn't very appealing.

Blockchains and crypto ecosystems have compelling advantages in other areas, but fiat payments aren't one of them.

First and foremost, simple, high-volume payments are cheaper and faster to execute in centralized systems.

Blockchains have complex consensus mechanisms and many nodes in which ledger data is distributed.

This means that while centralized payments flow quickly through a single infrastructure,

blockchain payments get copied to thousands of nodes and are subject to varying degrees of

speed and cost based on network congestion.

Transaction fees for Fed now are expected

to be in the range of five cents each or less. Automated clearinghouse, ACH, the most common

interbank payment method in the U.S., presently costs between 25 cents and up depending on the provider.

Bitcoin fees average around $1, though they can vary a lot, and transaction fees on Ethereum

...