Yesterday, the Boston Federal Reserve announced that it had concluded Project Hamilton, a central bank digital currency (CBDC) research project with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He will share more results of the technical feasibility work in the coming months. The first report was published in February. According to the US Treasury, it will probably still be a few years before the United States decides whether to issue a digital dollar.

“The Hamilton Project took the first critical steps toward a deeper understanding of how money could work better for everyone,” said Boston Fed Executive Vice President Jim Cunha.

The Hamilton Project drew on the experience of the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) and therefore rejected blockchain for a retail digital dollar due to speed challenges. However, it did borrow some concepts, such as Bitcoin’s Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) design, which somewhat resembles physical cash. MIT also has a focus on privacy.

The open source code, openCBDC, was released for others to take advantage of. In terms of scalability, it supports 1.84 million transactions per second, and transactions are final in less than a second.

Additional features, such as scheduling and auditing capabilities, have been added since February and will be part of the future report.

MIT has other ongoing collaborations with central banks, including with the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.

Meanwhile, the New York Federal Reserve is also active in researching the digital dollar, though its emphasis has been on wholesale CBDCs. It has a strategic alliance with the BIS Innovation Hub for the New York Innovation Center (NYIC).

Last month, NYIC published the results of the first phase of the Cedar Project for faster currency settlement. The second iteration partners with Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Ubin+ to explore wholesale CBDCs for cross-border payments and interoperability between different technologies.

In addition, the New York Federal Reserve is part of the Regulated Liability Network (RLN) experiments along with eight banks, Mastercard and SWIFT. The RLN aims to provide a single network that supports central bank money, commercial bank money, and liabilities of non-bank issuers.