Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari on Thursday dismissed crypto as “utterly useless” in comparison to artificial intelligence and tore into stablecoins, saying they do not offer meaningful advantages.
Why Fed’s Kashkari Believes Crypto Lacks Real Utility
Fed’s Kashkari has a history of making poisonous remarks about crypto. Yesterday’s comments show that his stance remains unchanged.
At the 2026 Midwest Economic Outlook summit in Fargo, North Dakota, he compared AI and cryptocurrency, stating that crypto “has been around for more than a decade” yet remains “utterly useless.”
“AI has not been around very long, and people are using it every day,” he noted. “This is demonstrating to me that this thing is real and it has real long-term potential for the US economy as opposed to crypto.”
Kashkari, who clinched the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis’ highest office in 2016, first asked the audience who had used AI tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini in the past week, then followed up with: “Raise your hand if you’ve ever bought or sold something with Bitcoin.”
Stablecoins No Match For Venmo
Turning to payments and stablecoins, the former investment banker expressed skepticism that the technology offers any real improvement over current financial systems. “I hear these terms, and it’s just like a buzzword salad,” he said. “What can I do with a stablecoin that I can’t do with Venmo today?”
Kashkari specifically criticized the idea of using stablecoins for remittances, noting that the benefit mainly applies to people outside the U.S. and the costs aren’t nearly as cheap as advertised. He cited his father-in-law in the Philippines, noting that although stablecoins arrive quickly, fees are still required to convert them into local currency for everyday use.
“If everybody in the world uses the same currency or the same payment platform. All these frictions go away. But all these other countries are not going to abandon their own monetary policy [for stablecoins],” Kashkari posited.
Kashkari’s stance sharply diverges from the approach taken by the Trump administration, which has increasingly embraced Bitcoin and U.S. dollar-backed stablecoins as strategic assets.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued that properly regulated stablecoins could help preserve the dollar’s hegemony in global payments while reinforcing its role as the world’s primary reserve currency.
Source: https://zycrypto.com/fed-president-slams-crypto-as-utterly-useless-compared-to-ai-labels-stablecoins-a-buzzword-salad/
