Bank of Canada Start CBDC Research Collaboration With MIT

The Bank of Canada is collaborating with MIT on CBDC research. The Bank of Canada has recently entered into a 12-month research partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) focused on the design of a Central Bank Digital Currency.

According to an announcement made on Wednesday, the bank will collaborate with the MIT Media Labs’ Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) team to analyze how “advanced technologies could affect the potential design of CBDC.”

This project is part of a larger development agenda focused on digital currencies, fintech, and how CBDCs could work in a Canadian context, according to the Canadian central bank.

The bank stated that “no decision has been made on whether to introduce a CBDC in Canada,” but did say that it would provide an update once the research project with MIT had concluded.

This is not the first crypto-related partnership that MIT DCI has entered into for CBDC research. Just last month, MIT DCI had published research on the topic in collaboration with The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Dubbed “Project Hamilton,” it had tested a “hypothetical general purpose CBDC” using two potential models. The two models included distributed ledger technology and the parallel processing of transactions on multiple computers, as opposed to relying on a single ordering server to prevent double-spending.

The United States will also start assigning resources towards researching CBDCs, according to President Joe Biden’s recent executive order which outlines “the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options” of a U.S.-based CBDC.