Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, September 4th, and today we are talking about a Fed Innovation Conference. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Well, friends, the big theme of right now,

at least the one that I'm most interested in watching closely, is if and how all of the

excited talking is turning into real meaningful action when it comes to this administration

and its promises around crypto. Along those lines, next month, the Federal Reserve will

hold a conference to discuss stablecoins.

Officially, the topic is payments innovation, and the discussion will include defy, tokenization,

stablecoin use cases, and business models. Fed Governor for Payments, Chris Waller said in a statement,

innovation has been a constant in payments to meet the changing needs of consumers and businesses.

I look forward to examining the opportunities and challenges of new technologies,

bringing together ideas on how to improve the safety and efficiency of payments,

and hearing from those helping to shape the future of payments.

Similar to the SEC's Crypto Roundtables earlier in the year, the conference will be

live streamed so all stakeholders can tune in.

Now, this is undeniably a big step for the Fed. Less than a year ago, the Fed was playing a major role in keeping stable coins in the crypto industry out of the banking system. Now, they're dedicating an event to exploring how the integration of crypto and Tradfi ecosystem should play out. And of course, while this is a shift, the science were already there that the Fed was starting to take stable coins in crypto more seriously. During an appearance at the Wyoming

Blockchain Symposium last month, for example, Governor Waller discussed stable coins at length.

Now, he has been a stablecoin proponent for a year or two, largely viewing them as a private

sector alternative to a CBDC. That speech really went in

depth into why he believes that stablecoins are important and why the Fed has a role to play in

their adoption. Waller essentially flagged that Fed infrastructure should be re-architected to ensure

it is compatible with crypto rails. While Waller is just one governor and while there are

...