The Boston Federal reserve and the Digital Currency Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released the findings of their initial research regarding a central bank digital currency (CBDC) last week.
“It is critical to understand how emerging technologies could support a CBDC and what challenges remain,” said Boston Fed Executive Vice President and Interim Chief Operating Officer Jim Cunha. “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 choices that should be considered when designing a CBDC.”
Among the technological achievements described by the paper are the creation of the core processing engine for a hypothetical general purpose CBDC, the production of a code base capable of handling 1.7 million transactions per second and the creation of a secure resilient and flexible architecture capable of resolving almost all transactions under two seconds.
The code for the collaboration between the Boston Fed and MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative, dubbed Project Hamilton, was released on github as open source software for contributions.
“There are still many remaining challenges in determining whether or how to adopt a central bank payment system for the United States,” said Neha Narula, director of the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT. “What is clear is that open-source software provides an important way to collaborate, experiment, and implement. In addition to supporting collaboration, monetary systems benefit from transparency and verifiability, which open-source offers.”
