There are decentralized exchanges which operate in the US.

None of the intrinsic aspects of crypto matter if its in a centralized exchange. In the cases of a centralized exchange BTC may as well equal fiat, for it has all of the downsides of fiat alongside the risk of an exit scam/mass theft, and with none of the insurances one may have with a fiat institution.

So, unfortunately, for these “crypto” maximalists, the crypto aspect of their digital currency is just some fun trivia and not something they even bother to leverage.

I work with a couple of organisations that have been advising public institutions on their investigations into CBDCs, and the entire timeline of FedNow development took place after CBDCs had initially been conceptualised. CBDCs became a mainstream concept in 2016 when the Bank of England started discussing them publicly. The Faster Payments Taskforce report (which was the basis of FedNow’s design) came out in 2017, and the Fed announced its plans to start work on FedNow in 2019. Many advanced economies announced plans to start seriously investigating the use of CDBCs in 2021, but they’d all been discussing the concept for years at that point.

I don’t know whether the fed’s investigation into CBDCs will result in it adopting one. But FedNow has been designed in such a way that it could easily be modified to support one. You’d just have to implement a version of it where the allowed participants were everybody who’s allowed to have a bank account, rather than only banks.