OpenCBDC to process 1.84M transactions per second as Boston Fed, MIT collab is complete

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The Fed­er­al Reserve Bank of Boston and MIT announced on Dec. 22 that their CBDC research effort, Project Hamil­ton, is now complete.

That ini­tia­tive aimed to research the tech­ni­cal fea­si­bil­i­ty of a cen­tral bank dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy or CBDC. Such an asset would be tied to the val­ue of the U.S. dol­lar and issued by a cen­tral bank — in the case of the U.S., most like­ly by the Fed­er­al Reserve.

Project Hamil­ton also aimed to devel­op soft­ware capa­ble of pro­cess­ing CBDC trans­ac­tions. Neha Naru­la, direc­tor of the Dig­i­tal Cur­ren­cy Ini­tia­tive, said:

The OpenCB­DC code­base that result­ed from this suc­cess­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion [Project Hamil­ton] pro­vides a cred­i­ble and unbi­ased resource to eval­u­ate design choic­es and ensure that a poten­tial future CBDC could serve the public’s interest.

Jim Cun­ha, Exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent of the Boston Fed, added that the project aimed to be agnos­tic toward any future sta­ble­coin pol­i­cy devel­op­ments in the U.S. Instead, the project was meant to take “crit­i­cal ear­ly steps” toward under­stand­ing CBDCs.

Project Hamil­ton has been ongo­ing since it began in 2020.

In Feb­ru­ary 2022, the research team announced the project’s first results and released a whitepa­per along­side the OpenCB­DC soft­ware. At the time, OpenCB­DC was said to be capa­ble of han­dling as many as 1.7 mil­lion trans­ac­tions per second.

Today’s announce­ment sug­gest­ed that the soft­ware now has a slight­ly high­er through­put of 1.84 mil­lion trans­ac­tions per sec­ond. Fur­ther­more, researchers have added new fea­tures such as pro­gram­ma­bil­i­ty and sup­port for audit­ing since the last announce­ment. The team intends to pub­lish fur­ther infor­ma­tion in the future.

Despite its suc­cess, Project Hamil­ton has attract­ed scruti­ny from law­mak­ers. Ear­li­er this month, mem­bers of Con­gress wrote a let­ter sug­gest­ing that oth­er com­pa­nies involved in Project Hamil­ton could gain an unfair advan­tage in the CBDC space.

As such, Project Hamil­ton could be over­shad­owed by more offi­cial gov­ern­ment projects, such as the Fed­er­al Reserve’s ongo­ing research into a dig­i­tal dollar.

How­ev­er, the U.S. ulti­mate­ly does not have any defin­i­tive plans for a CBDC, mean­ing that Project Hamil­ton may be giv­en room to grow despite any challenges.

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