The launch of FedNow is a milestone that shifts the tides of the financial industry. The implications of this shift are profound and wide-reaching; what is all but lost in the news cycle is a full admission by the central bankers that the electronic dollar is nearing the end of the line. It is time for industry-wide adoption of real-time, streaming, digital dollars. In a world where global networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDC (and more recently, Solana, Hedera, and XRP) have proven the potential of distributed ledger technology, bankers, large and small alike, can no longer afford to ignore the reality of 'streaming money.'

As a starting point, FedNow is the Federal Reserve's response to the growing demand for real-time payments in the United States. But it's much more than that. It's an acknowledgment that the traditional financial system, which has been the primary facilitator of monetary transactions for a hundred years, is outdated and risks being displaced by a quickly growing, 1.5 trillion-dollar industry of digital assets, inflation hedges, and borderless, low-cost, high-speed transactions.