Boston’s Federal Reserve Bank along with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has published results from the CBDC project named Project Hamilton that aims to highlight the US-based policy decisions. The results deal with the initial phase of the respective CBDC project which is a multi-year mutual research venture centered around the CBDC.
Phase One accomplished
The publication of these results at the end of the initial stage of Project Hamilton is known as a mutual work of MIT and Boston’s Federal Reserve Bank to construct as well as design an operable CBDC prototype. It is noteworthy here that the government of the United States has not yet ordered the construction or else the execution of a certified CBDC. Nonetheless, Boston’s Federal Reserve Bank comes under the influence of the Federal Reserve System.
The objective of the first stage was the creation of OpenCBDC (software for the processing of transactions) that was efficiently working from a technical point of view to handle the general CBDC of a huge country like the United States.
OpenCBDC has been launched by MIT and the Boston Fed over GitHub as open-source software. In the case of developing a fundamental processing engine to support a central bank digital currency, the group achieved its task and the speeds reached over 1.7M transactions per second with a considerable majority having their settlement finality in just two seconds.
Further advancement in the project
The document additionally notes that there is flexibility in the technology that would permit for the adjustment thereof based on the policy decisions. The Boston Fed has responsibility for the initial district of the Federal Reserve. Even though the research is carried out autonomously without the deliberation of the Board of Governor of the Federal Reserve, Project Hamilton pursues informing as well as enhancing policy decisions focused on a CBDC of the United States. Apart from that, the Fed possesses a TechLab that additionally organizes CBDC experimentation and research.
Consumer privacy counts to be among the prominent priorities mentioned by the project in terms of the design thereof even if the language utilized signals that the privacy consideration is fundamentally centered around preventing third parties from reaching the customers. In the second phase of this project, the rest of the technical designs, as opposed to the previous phase, would be researched by the MIT and the Boston Fed to additionally optimize the functionality, resilience, and robust privacy of the first phase.
