“The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Digital Currency Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today released the findings of their initial technological research into a central bank digital currency, or CBDC. The published research describes a theoretical high-performance and resilient transaction processor for a CBDC by developing open-source research software, OpenCBDC. This collaborative effort, known as Project Hamilton, focuses on technological experimentation and does not aim to create a usable CBDC for the United States. The research is separate from the Federal Reserve’s Board’s evaluation of the pros and cons of a CBDC. “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.” The whitepaper released today details findings from the first research phase. In this phase, researchers selected concepts from cryptography, distributed systems, and blockchain technology to build and test platforms that would give policymakers substantial flexibility in the potential creation of a CBDC. The paper describes the following findings:

• The team met its goal of creating a core processing engine for a hypothetical general purpose CBDC and explored it in two architectures.
• The work produced one code base capable of handling 1.7 million transactions per second.
• The vast majority of transactions reached settlement finality in under two seconds within architectures that support secure, resilient performance and offer the significant technological flexibility required to adjust to future policy direction.

Researchers with MIT and the Boston Fed released the code for Project Hamilton, OpenCBDC, in github for contributions…”