I see this as a way for Brian Brooks at the OCC to appear to be a “thought leader” as a crypto proponent. I have had to interface with his type more than once (most unfortunately), but luckily it doesn’t appear the Biden administration will confirm him for the role the current administration has been pushing him for.
Many other countries have instant payment networks without the need for crypto or blockchain networks. Zelle already supports instant payments in the US, and the Federal Reserve is rolling out their own instant payment service in 2023. FedWire and similar institutional services are arguably superior when compared to distributed ledgers and their abysmal transaction rates. Are banks not going to keep reserve accounts at the Fed (which is where they’d net and settle)? And with central banks all moving toward digital accounts for citizens, and most of those central banks not considering crypto, this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.
Ethereum is built for a financial world where trust doesn’t exist, and you must build your logic into smart contracts instead of your application. Very few jurisdictions where the rule of law and trust in the financial system doesn’t exist. I think there’s benefit in open sourcing the components that drive financial services and infrastructure, but believe it’s disingenuous to conflate that with the need for tokenized finance, distributed ledgers, and similar Rube Goldberg mechanizations.