DC Fintech Week recap: the FDIC chair asks how fast AI agents will move deposits, and Kalshi's CEO wants onion futures back

FDIC chairman Travis Hill came to DC Fintech Week with a final stablecoin rule in progress. His agency had asked a long list of questions in its GENIUS Act proposal, and "we are working hard on a final rule now," Hill said, going through the comments 1. The open points he named included what side businesses issuers can run, and whether an issuer with several stablecoin brands keeps one reserve pool or separate ones, so that one coin could fail without taking the rest down 1.

Asked about AI agents shifting deposits whenever a better rate appears, Hill pointed out that rate-chasing services already exist and many customers don't use them 1. For him the open question is "to what extent are people and businesses going to delegate the decision-making authority to these types of tools," and how quickly 1. He gave the same answer on tokenization: "my general perception is it's likely to be a gradual shift over time" 1.

Hill also walked through what 24/7 money does to a bank failure. Today a bank usually fails on a Friday night, a buyer takes it over during the weekend and it reopens on Monday 1. That gets harder if "there's basically no end of the day on Friday," he said, though he noted most of the world still keeps business hours 1. On whether agencies can keep up, he said "the APA process values deliberativeness rather than nimbleness" 1.

Brent McIntosh, the Citigroup lawyer who used to be general counsel at the Treasury, said Washington has moved its focus to material risk 2. He didn't accept the word people use for it: "If we have been deregulated, nobody told me" 2. Some legal questions are settled, he said, such as "the idea that a tokenized deposit is in fact a deposit" 2. The hard part is getting the US, the EU, the UK and Asian jurisdictions to similar answers for cross-border use 2. Many of the questions are old ones, he argued, but "what's not the same this time is the pace of change" 2.

Kalshi's founder and CEO Tarek Mansour opened by reading a court opinion that called speculative markets a crime against religion and morality 3. Then he gave the date: "It's from 1888 and it's about grain futures" 3. He drew the line with gambling at the business model, saying a casino sets lines against its customers while an open market rewards the card counters 3. Mansour said he'd like the ban on onion futures repealed, because "we should be able to trade onion derivatives," and that customer demand is pulling Kalshi toward contracts on AI compute 3. He said that from the start "the first principle we sort of defined the company is regulatory first" 3.

Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, sent recorded remarks for the conference's ninth edition 4. She said "innovation depends on trust" and that Congress needs to close gaps in crypto and AI law 4. On fintech's promise to reach underserved people, she said: "I want to see the receipts" 4. She named buy now, pay later and earned wage access as products that deserve a closer look 4.

The week's livestream from Amazon's HQ2 is on StreamETH too 5. Other recorded sessions covered prediction markets as infrastructure, agentic money and a post-quantum financial system 678. StreamETH has 24 of the week's 25 recordings transcribed, and this recap quotes only the four sessions whose speakers are named in their titles 1234.