Fed researching cryptocurrency
Last week, Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard announced a partnership between the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a multiyear effort to build and test “a hypothetical digital currency oriented to central bank uses.”
“The objectives of our research and experimentation across the Federal Reserve System are to assess the safety and efficiency of digital currency systems, to inform our understanding of private-sector arrangements, and to give us hands-on experience to understand the opportunities and limitations of possible technologies for digital forms of central bank money,” said Brainard during a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
In addition to the collaboration and research efforts, Brainard noted the Fed’s use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to support analytical functions, as well as supervisory interest in financial institutions using these technologies for their own decisionmaking. Separately, the Fed shared progress it has made using distributed ledger technology (DLT) to build a small-scale, experimental payment system powered by Hyperledger Fabric, one of several frameworks offered by the open source Hyperledger community. NAFCU joined Hyperledger in 2017.
continue reading »
