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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Is a payment processor operated by the Federal Reserve good enough? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow

Well, it probably would be, except guess who killed it in favor of a crypto scheme? https://www.jitumaster.com/2025/06/us-president-signs-execut...

I agree about the PO though. Social media shouldn't be a for-profit enterprise either.

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Is there another source that says what exactly happened in that executive order? I can't find one signed on june 6th that had anything to do with payments.

[0] was from March, and demanded treasury modernization (like paperless and stuff), but didn't really say anything about crypto or FedNow. And FedNow's website mentions nothing about the program being slowed down (just announcements about new things happening in Q3 and a bunch of new signed on banks).

0: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/03/28/2025-05...

I can find nothing about FedNow being replaced or even changed recently. Your source is the only one about this, and it's some no-name crypto junk site nobody's ever heard of.

I think the federal reserve is too close to the status quo to be effective for this. It is owned by the federally chartered banks, the same ones that all have longstanding relationships with the current payment processors.

A government organization like the mint should be in charge of the layer 1 of money transfer. Let the current providers adapt and sell their other services on top of it. It could be crypto, copy the existing systems, or be something new all together. It doesn't even have to be free, they could add in a small transfer tax or whatever. The point is that any person or business should be able to send money to any other, for any reason. At the very least within the country.

The banks have longstanding relationships with payment processors but they aren’t stupid. The duopoly has fat margins that the banks want a cut of, hence earlier initiatives like Zelle.

Ugh, they killed FedNow too? That hadn’t hit my radar. Why a waste.

I don't think so?

Here's the EO, I don't see where it kills FedNow, it seems like it just mandates electronic payments and disallows paper checks: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/mode...

Heh, while I like the idea of using immediate electronic dispursement over the mail.

I do find the ending of the EO pretty amusing. You're telling the agencies exactly what to do, how is that not impairing their authority?

> Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

> (i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or

You can be almost certain these EOs are composed in tandem with LLMs.

And its okay because the federal employees who need to know what these say will just ask their LLM what it says! /s

That's boilerplate that's been attached on most of all EO's for decades now.

The point of EOs is that they aren't laws and cannot change laws, but they can provide [mandatory] guidance to entities, under the Executive, on how to implement laws. So imagine there's a law that says some agency can ban whatever widgets they want. An EO requiring that they not ban widgets made in Timbuktu would not contravene that law, but provide guidance on how the law will be implemented. By contrast if the law said that the agency must ban any harmful widgets, an EO would not be able to prevent them from banning harmful widgets, even if they happen to be made in Timbuktu.

Thankfully modern EO's are (contrary to intuition) pretty much weak sauce because of this balancing act. See, for contrast the dictatorial mandate that is executive order 6102. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

But how does mandatory guidance not impair the authority of an agency?

The agency is no longer allowed to do something against the guidance! Or the Order must not be ordering some action?

It's the law that must not be ordering some action. Laws generally provide e.g. regulatory agencies with some degree of discretion on how to apply a given law, like ban a widget. But that discretion can be defined by executive order. By contrast, if a law says an agency must do something, then an EO cannot override that law and direct them not to do that thing.

Government agencies in the executive branch don't have independent authority. They work for the president, and an EO isn't much different than the email you get from your boss directing you to do work a certain way.

An email from my boss telling me to implement something using rust transpiled to wasm certainly impairs my authority to determine the best approach.

My argument is not the EO has the legality to make a claim; it's that the top half of the EO is at odds with the disclaimer at the end. If you mandate somebody to do something then you're impairing their authority to have chosen not to do something.

Like by definition the EO impairs agencies that were using their authority to issue paper checks to continue doing so. It may be advantageous to stop issuing checks but to claim mandating that they don't doesn't impair their authority is just false.

You're conflating authority, the authorization to do something, with autonomy - the ability to use that authority at your own personal discretion. The law grants a regulatory agency the authority to do something that they would not otherwise be able to do, like nationally ban widgets. But the law does not also inherently grant them to the autonomy to do so entirely at their own discretion. For agencies under the Executive branch, the President is free to direct them to utilize their authority at his discretion.

FedNow has not been diminished through policy, still full speed ahead.

Every time we have this discussion someone brings up FedNow, and I will repeat the same question I always ask: when I visit the farmer's market this weekend, will anyone there be able to practically accept payment in FedNow? What would that even look like? (FYI the vendors take most cards, Apple/Google Pay, Venmo, paper cash, Square Cash, Apple Cash, etc.)

If the answer is "no for these reasons", then this probably shines a big light on why FedNow is not serving the same use case.

What is preventing any of those mentioned card vendors from integrating with FedNow either directly or via some abstractive layer through another entity? I don't understand why the answer would be 'no for these reasons'.

The retail payment companies I've seen all use the same structure: they provide a retail interface and then handle monetary transfers within their own proprietary network (effectively a centralized database). To interface with the financial system, they provide a mechanism to occasionally wire funds to/from a traditional bank account. If FedNow has any role in these systems, it's just to speed up the occasional funds-wiring process by a few hours. I have yet to see anyone actually directly using FedNow in any meaningful sense for retail payments.

Most likely, what it would look like is they would have a routing and account number posted. You'd go into your bank app and push a payment to those numbers, and they'd say yeah great; not confirm the transaction and everything would probably work out.

Is that satisfying? Not really. Is it possible? Yes.

There are over a thousand different companies affiliated with FedNow, so the answer is going to be "it won't look like FedNow, but you will use some wrapper for it"

I thought FedNow was for settlement between banks, not a consumer-facing service. That would be a "Central Bank Digital Currency": https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...

There were some bills on the subject, Republicans opposed to a CBDC to demonstrate their libertarian credentials:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1919...

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1430...

HR-1919 passed the house, but it's not clear if "they" intend to bring it up for vote in the Senate.

People have submitted comments to the gov for using XRP as a mechanism, but AI tells me that FedNow is not killed or being replaced.

That article is XRP-pumping misinformation. Like almost 100% of content related to Ripple.

This is amazing.

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