The debate on crypto utility surprisingly still keeps making it to the headlines even after digital assets like Bitcoin have made inroads into national and corporate treasuries as of 2026. In a fresh development, Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President, Neel Kashkari tagged crypto as “utterly useless” despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to make the U.S. the crypto capital of the world.
Kashkari was speaking at the 2026 Midwest Economic Outlook Summit in North Dakota this week when he addressed reasons behind his skepticism around crypto.
“Crypto’s been around for more than a decade and it’s utterly useless,” the FOMC member said. As opposed to crypto, he said, AI is proving to be far more useful with people using ChatGPT more than Bitcoin for day-to-day use.
Kashkari seconded gold-backing millionaire Peter Schiff’s argument that even if crypto assets facilitate instant cross-border transactions — eventually those assets do need to be converted into fiat currencies to be usable.
Schiff, in December last year, had joined Binance founder Changpeng Zhao on the stage of the Binance Blockchain Week in Dubai for a debate on gold versus Bitcoin. There, Schiff had made the same point that even if merchants accept crypto payments — at some point in that transaction the digital asset is converted into fiat — insinuating that crypto is not a whole currency in itself.
Under Kashkari, the Minneapolis state has been skeptical of granting direct access to the Fed’s payment services to crypto firms.
Kashkari’s opposition against the mainstream adoption of crypto comes in the backdrop of asset management giants backing the asset class.
Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, for instance, has recently shown major optimism towards the tokenization of real world assets.
The crypto market retains its reputation of being volatile, especially now that the market has been in a slumber since earlier this year. At present, the valuation of the market stands at $2.33 trillion. Bitcoin is also trading at its yearly low of $68,200.
On Wednesday, U.S. Treasury chairman Paul Atkins expressed a strong support for crypto from the government in the coming year.
“People whose only focus is on the number always going up are likely to be disappointed, whether they are buying stocks, precious metals, or crypto. Markets go up and markets go down in response to many factors. As regulators, the best thing we can do is to ensure that the rules governing the asset classes we regulate enable people to have the information they need to express their market sentiments through decisions about whether to buy, sell, or hold the assets at issue,” Atkins noted.