Yes. I'm looking into Taler and Interleger (Open Payments) for direct fiat currency transfer.
And yes, payments are very different from how (most of) the Fediverse works right now.
There was an service called sub.club ~ which unfortunately shut down recently ~ that was experimenting with charging money for access to premium newsfeeds.
I'm doing that now with #Emissary, along with letting bands sell albums over Bandwagon.fm