Boston Fed, MIT issue CBDC whitepaper

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published a whitepaper detailing the feasibility of a digital dollar, or U.S. central bank digital currency (CBDC). The whitepaper describes a theoretical high-performance and resilient transaction processor for CBDC.

This effort to research CBDC, known as Project Hamilton, is a multi-year collaboration between the Boston Fed and MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative. Project Hamilton focuses on technological experimentation and does not aim to create a usable CBDC at this time. In addition, the whitepaper – which is Phase 1 in Project Hamilton’s research plan – states the research is separate from the Federal Reserve Board’s evaluation of the pros and cons of a CBDC.

Findings in the whitepaper include:

• the research team successfully created a core processing engine for a hypothetical general purpose CBDC and explored it in two architectures;

 

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