Boston Fed and MIT shutter CBDC ‘Project Hamilton’
A joint venture in collaboration with MIT, the initiative known as Project Hamilton, was named after Founding Father Alexander Hamilton and MIT and Apollo Mission computer scientist Margaret Hamilton. Boston Fed executive vice president Jim Cunha reveals that the now-concluded project was “agnostic” from the start about any future policy decisions regarding new technologies and US currency.
Further, the project focused on better understanding the opportunities and challenges of different technologies that might be used to manage and transfer CBDCs. In early 2022, Project Hamilton published research on a transaction processor for a theoretical high-performance and resilient CBDC.
The processor was developed as open-source research software, called OpenCBDC, and project leaders urged global contributors to continue working on it. OpenCBDC, a core processing engine for money that focuses on security, performance, scalability, and flexibility, provides a codebase that supports 1.84 million transactions per second and settlement.
This means transactions can be completed in under one second. Neha Narula, director of MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative says: “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 released, Project Hamilton researchers added functionality to OpenCBDC such as programmability and audit that may be useful to evaluate a potential CBDC.
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