Permissionless blockchains provide accessibility benefits for payments that centralized instant payment systems cannot match, despite similar capabilities, according to analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The finding follows the passage of the GENIUS Act in July 2025, which provided regulatory clarity for stablecoins.
In a Liberty Street Economics blog post, Michael Junho Lee of the New York Fed and Rod Garratt, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, contend that while FedNow and other real time payment systems offer speed and low costs, they require both parties to hold accounts at participating financial institutions. This excludes unbanked populations and creates barriers for international transactions requiring correspondent banking relationships.
“These advantages are not intrinsic to the form of money that stablecoins embody but instead arise from their issuance on permissionless blockchains,” the researchers wrote, noting that any monetary instrument issued on such blockchains can achieve borderless reach. These include tokenized Treasury money market funds and deposit tokens, not just stablecoins. The researchers identify permissionless blockchains as the key differentiator, but they don’t address another stablecoin feature that enhances accessibility even further.
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