Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Federal Reserve Governor Chris Waller proclaimed there is “nothing scary” in digital asset innovations, during a speech in Jackson Hole on Wednesday-the other senior bold official to praise the sector this week.
“There is nothing to be afraid of when thinking about smart contracts, tokenization or distributed headbooks,” he said at the Salt Conference. “It is not a new story to utilize innovative technology to build new payment services.”
Waller, who is reportedly a top election to the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, has long been a supporter of the industry and stablecoins.
Waller was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2020 and said some of the best innovations have been “destroyed” in the last few years because they were tied to digital assets.
“It’s just technologies, why are they so bad?” he said. “If they lead to more useful and interesting ways of doing things, we should look at and adopt it too.”
Waller said Fed is looking at how to tokenize things and how to use smart contracts as well as distributed headbooks.
“We may never go that route as a central bank, but there is no reason why we do not investigate to see what is happening,” he said.
Waller spoke a day after the Fed Vice President of Supervision Michelle Bowman, who similarly said that the industry should be treated better by banks and bank regulators and praised tokenization.
Join Crypto Policy Conversation 10 September in DC – register now for Coindesk: Policy & Regulation.
