Governor Chris Waller: stablecoins and financial innovation could reshape the dollars international role

Governor Chris Waller opened the fifth conference on the international roles of the U.S. dollar and framed the meetings research agenda on how financial innovation could affect the dollars global prominence.

"Distributed ledger technologies and tokenized assets such as stablecoins are creating new channels for global dollar intermediation that operate alongside or sometimes in conjunction with traditional banking and payment systems," Governor Chris Waller said. He said these innovations could "expand access, improve efficiency, and foster competition," while also "introducing new vulnerabilities, underscoring the importance of policy frameworks that preserve trust and resilience without unnecessarily constraining innovation."

Waller noted the conferences context and purpose: bringing together researchers, policymakers and market participants to study how innovations such as stablecoins affect payment systems, foreign exchange markets and the demand for U.S. safe assets. He summarized key research themes the papers will address, including stablecoin-based transaction growth, spillovers into broader financial markets, potential effects on exchange rates and cross-border capital flows, and whether dollar-backed stablecoins could link global liquidity demand directly to U.S. Treasury markets.

He placed the discussion in the Feds longer institutional context, saying the traditional drivers of the dollars rolethe U.S. economys size and the depth of its financial marketsremain important even as technological change reshapes how dollars are held and moved. Waller also acknowledged the passing of former Chairman Alan Greenspan during his remarks.

The conference was introduced as a two-day event co-hosted with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; following Wallers remarks the moderator moved the program to the first session of the day.