The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has published a statement confirming that research into the technical feasibility of a possible digital dollar has concluded.
A joint venture in partnership with MIT, the initiative called Project Hamilton, was named after Founding Father Alexander Hamilton and MIT and Apollo Mission renowned computer scientist Margaret Hamilton.
Jim Cunha, Boston Fed executive vice president, announced that the now-concluded project was “agnostic” from the beginning about any future policy decisions about new technologies and the United States currency.
Moreover, this project focused on better understanding the challenges and opportunities brought by different technologies that may be used to manage and transfer central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).
In early 2022, Project Hamilton published research on a transaction processor for an entirely theoretical high-performance and resilient CBDC. That processor was created as an open-source research software, known as OpenCBDC, and project leaders encouraged global contributors to continue putting in some work on it.
OpenCBDC is an integral processing engine for money that focuses majorly on performance, security, flexibility, and scalability, and offers codebase designed to support 1.84 million transactions per second and settlement. It means that transactions can be completed in under one second.
The director of MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative, Neha Narula, stated:
“The OpenCBDC codebase that resulted from this successful collaboration provides a credible and unbiased resource to evaluate design choices and ensure that a potential future CBDC could serve the public’s interest.”
After the whitepaper and code were published, Project Hamilton researchers added some functionality to OpenCBDC including audit and programmability that might prove useful to evaluate a possible CBDC.
MIT and the Boston Fed will release some more findings on Project Hamilton in the coming weeks, with the belief that the initiative offered a strong infrastructure for policy and technology decisions that might come to the forefront when developing a central bank digital currency in the future.
Narula added:
“Our collaboration with central banks such as the Boston Fed is at the heart of DCI’s ongoing mission to serve as a neutral convener of governments, academics, open-source communities, and the private sector. We hope that this collaborative, open-source research effort is a model for researchers from academia and the public sector to build on as we explore the future of money.”
