Central bankers from the UK and US are divided on the outlook for stablecoins, a disagreement over potential regulatory signals and adoption implications for institutional crypto investors.
Fed, Bank of England Clash on Stablecoin Future
1 June 2026 - 09:01 CEST
Bank of England policymaker Megan Greene forecast at a 31 May conference that tokenized bank deposits would displace the popular fiat-backed tokens.
Speaking at a conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia, on 31 May, US Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller disagreed. He argued stablecoins function as payment instruments that promote competition with traditional systems and reduce costs. Waller added there is nothing dangerous about them as they bring rivalry to the payments world.
US dollar-pegged stablecoins dominate the sector, which has a total market value of around $320bn, according to DeFiLlama.
Greene said commercial banks would tokenize deposits once they realized they risked losing ground to digital assets. Using an animal analogy, she compared central bank digital currencies to a tortoise, stablecoins to a hare and tokenized deposits to a rhino. Her bet is on the rhino. "Five years from now, I suspect we might wonder why we were talking about stablecoins," she said.
