One of the most interesting discussions at the Philadelphia Fed’s 10th Annual Fintech Conference wasn’t about which stablecoin wins.
It was about the infrastructure underneath them.
The panel, “Tokenized Deposits or Stablecoins? How Banks and Crypto Issuers Shape the Future of Digital Payments,” brought together:
• Greg Baer — President & CEO, Bank Policy Institute
• Dan Fishman — Treasurer, Circle
• Caitlin Long — Founder & CEO, Custodia Bank
• Shawn Main — EVP & Chief Business Architect, Vantage Bank
• Mike McCoy — Head of Digital Assets, GTM & Sales, Fiserv
• Moderated by Brooke Ybarra — SVP, Innovation & Strategy, American Bankers Association
The conversation moved toward AI-driven payments and a future where money may need to move autonomously across an increasingly fragmented financial system.
One thing stood out:
For this to work at scale, the financial infrastructure needs liquidity, interoperability and connectivity.
Stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits, public blockchains, private networks and traditional banking systems aren't all going to magically become one network.
They need infrastructure that connects them.
And that's where this becomes particularly interesting from a Chainlink perspective.
CCIP is being built for interoperability across networks. CRE for orchestrating workflows across blockchains and existing financial systems. Chainlink's data infrastructure provides pricing and verification, while its compliance stack is being developed for regulated transactions.
And now AI agents are entering the equation too: software capable of initiating transactions, accessing services and making payments autonomously.
The panel wasn't about
@Chainlink.
But the financial architecture they were describing increasingly resembles the exact problem Chainlink has spent years building toward.
The future of money may be fragmented at the asset level, but interconnected at the infrastructure level.
Watch here: 👀