Fed Conference Frames Dollar-Denominated Stablecoins as Reinforcing U.S. Currency Dominance

The Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York jointly hosted the fifth iteration of the International Roles of the U.S. Dollar Conference on 22 and 23 June 2026, with this year’s programme centred on digital assets, stablecoins, and their implications for how households, firms, and financial intermediaries access and transfer dollar-denominated value. The event brought together academics, central bankers, multilateral organisations, and private-sector representatives to examine whether financial innovation strengthens or erodes the dollar’s structural primacy.

The dominant analytical thread across the conference was reinforcement rather than displacement. Governor Christopher Waller argued that distributed ledger technology and tokenised assets, including stablecoins, open new channels for global dollar intermediation and should broadly complement rather than supplant the traditional financial sector. Cornell’s Eswar Prasad framed the moment as renewed competition between public and private money, with digital currencies expanding as exchange media while central bank money retains its settlement and store-of-value function; he expressed scepticism that any current development will meaningfully dent the dollar’s position, citing the absence of credible alternatives and the persistence of network effects. A multi-institution panel reached a similar conclusion, noting that dominant stablecoins are overwhelmingly dollar-denominated and are increasingly deployed in international payments, trade, and settlement.

The conference also featured a presentation of a Committee on the Global Financial System (CGFS) report on foreign currency funding risk and cross-border liquidity, presented by Stephanie Curcuru of the Federal Reserve Board and Bryan Hardy of the Bank for International Settlements, which underlined the continuing centrality of U.S. dollar funding within the international banking system. For operators, the likelier read from the conference is that senior Fed officials are signalling comfort with dollar-stablecoin growth as a net positive for U.S. monetary reach, a posture that appears to frame forthcoming stablecoin legislation as an extension of dollar infrastructure rather than a constraint on it.