US Federal Reserve Seemingly Omits Blockchain Firms In FedNow’s Early Adopters List

The U.S. Federal Reserve announced that 57 firms have been approved and certified to use its FedNow instant payments system following its scheduled launch later this month, and noticeably, blockchain firms are largely absent from the list.

The Central Bank of the U.S. has seemingly made no mention of blockchain firms in its official list of businesses certified to use the instant payment infrastructure dubbed FedNow. It is designed to provide faster payment services to popular payment apps like Cash App and Venmo.

While the Federal Reserve did not offer the specific date for the service’s official launch, it announced that 41 banks and 15 service providers, including financial giants like Bank of New York Mellon, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and US Bancorp, among many others have successfully completed the testing and will be ready to offer the service as soon as it goes live sometime this month.

Service providers that are currently testing FedNow are ACI Worldwide Corp., Alacriti, Aptys Solutions, ECS Fin Inc., Finastra, Finzly, FIS, Fiserv Solutions, LLC, FPS GOLD, Jack Henry, Juniper Payments, a PSCU Company, Open Payment Network, Pidgin, Inc., Temenos and Vertifi Software, LLC.

Unfortunately, out of the 57 early adopters currently testing the FedNow service, only two blockchain firms would be able to connect to the app when it officially goes live this month. These are Metal Blockchain developed by Metallicus and the private blockchain-based business-to-business payment solution, Tassat Group.

“We are on track for the FedNow Service launch, with a strong cohort of financial institutions and service providers of all sizes in the process of completing the final round of readiness testing,” the first vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and FedNow program executive Ken Montgomery said.

“With go-live nearing, financial institutions and their industry partners should be confident in moving forward with plans to join the network of organizations participating in the FedNow Service,” he added.

In April, White House aspirant Robert Kennedy Jr. slammed the Federal Reserve’s plan to release its central bank digital currency (CBDC), underlining that it would just lead to the government seizing and banning cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin (BTC), in the long run.

“The Fed just announced it will introduce its “FedNow” Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in July. CBDCs grease the slippery slope to financial slavery and political tyranny,” the presidential aspirant said.

“The Fed will initially limit its CBDC to interbank transactions but we should not be blind to the obvious danger that this is the first step in banning and seizing bitcoin as the Treasury did with gold 90 years ago today in 1933,” Kennedy Jr. further said, adding, “Watch as governments, which never let a good crisis go to waste, use Covid-19 and the banking crisis to usher in a new wave of CBDCs as a safe haven from germ-laden paper currencies or as protection against bank runs.”