Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and MIT Publish Central Bank Digital Currency Research and Open Source Code – Regulation

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have jointly published the first results of their research into central bank digital currency (CBDC). They also released the open source code for the CBDC project.

Boston Fed and MIT publish initial results of their CBDC research

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Digital Currency Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) released the first results of their central bank digital currency (CBDC) research on Thursday.

This research is separate from the digital dollar research conducted by the Federal Reserve Board. The Federal Reserve also recently released its long-awaited CBDC report.

The collaboration between the Boston Fed and MIT, known as Project Hamilton, “is focused on technological experimentation and is not aimed at creating a viable CBDC for the United States,” they explained. The initiative was announced in 2020.

Jim Cunha, Executive Vice President and Interim Chief Operating Officer of the Boston Fed, said: “It is critical to understand how new technologies could support a CBDC and what challenges remain,” he added:

This collaboration between MIT and our technologists has created a scalable CBDC research model that allows us to learn more about these technologies and the decisions that should be considered when developing a CBDC.

“The work resulted in a codebase capable of processing 1.7 million transactions per second,” explains the project’s white paper.

The researchers too released the code for Project Hamilton, OpenCBDC. The open source code is available for contributions on github.

Neha Narula, director of MIT's Digital Currency Initiative, commented: "There are many remaining challenges in deciding whether or how to implement a central bank payments system for the United States."

According to the announcement:

In the coming years, the second phase of this partnership will allow Project Hamilton to explore alternative technical designs to enhance the already robust privacy, resiliency and functionality of the technology outlined in the first phase.

What do you think about the Boston Fed and MIT releasing their first research and open source code on central bank digital currency? Let us know in the comments section below.

Kevin Helms

As a student of Austrian economics, Kevin discovered Bitcoin in 2011 and has been an evangelist ever since. His interests lie in Bitcoin security, open source systems, network effects, and the interface between economics and cryptography.

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