Fed’s Neel Kashkari Says Crypto ‘Utterly Useless’

Neel Kashkari, the president of the US Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, says that crypto is “utterly useless” in comparison to artificial intelligence and took a swipe at stablecoins, saying they don’t have many uses.

Speaking at the 2026 Midwest Economic Outlook summit on Thursday, Kashkari drew comparisons between AI and crypto, saying the latter “has been around for more than a decade, and it’s utterly useless.”

“AI has not been around very long, and people are using it every day,” he added. “This is demonstrating to me that this thing is real and it has real long-term potential for the US economy as opposed to crypto.”

Neel Kashkari (left) speaking at the Midwest Economic Outlook summit on Thursday. Source: YouTube

Kashkari said that the way the crypto industry has framed how stablecoins can be used is “a buzzword salad.”

“I always ask people: What can I do with the stablecoin that I can’t do with Venmo today?” he said. “I could send any one of you $5 with Venmo, or PayPal, or Zelle, so what is it that this magical stablecoin can do? Then I get a buzzword salad answer, blah blah blah, tokenized deposits.”

Kashkari took specific aim at the notion of stablecoins being used for remittances, as he highlighted that this mainly serves people outside the US, and argued that it’s not as cheap as people think. 

Related: SEC leaders seek to clarify how tokenized securities interact with existing regulation

He used the example of his father-in-law, based in the Philippines, arguing that while he could receive stablecoins quickly, he still needs to pay fees to convert them into the local currency to actually transact with them. 

“If everybody in the world uses the same currency or the same payment platform. All these frictions go away. But all these other countries are not going to abandon their own monetary policy [for stablecoins],” he said. 

“When it comes to anything about crypto or stablecoins, ask the most basic questions and don’t settle for word salad nonsense answers,” he said.

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