Posts tagged CBDC
MIT Digital Currency Initiative presents CBDC research to Ireland's IIEA

In October, former central banker Chris Calabia of MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative (MIT DCI) gave a talk at The Institute of International & European Affairs titled “Towards a Central Bank Digital Currency? One View from the United States.”

In this, the second of the IIEA’s mini-series of webinars on the subject of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), Chris Calabia, Head of CBDC Programs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Digital Currency Initiative, shares recent research on the opportunities and challenges presented by the potential introduction of a CBDC like a ‘digital dollar’. Mr. Calabia addresses practical and policy questions that this digital asset could raise for our economies and societies, including whether CBDCs could promote greater financial inclusion and how to safeguard privacy while mitigating other risks like fraud and money laundering.

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MIT’s Project Hamilton for CBDC open sources smart contract research

This week MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative (MIT DCI) released the source code of research into smart contracts for central bank digital currency (CBDC) – PArSEC (Parallelized Architecture for Scalably Executing smart Contracts). Given the solution is designed for central banks, it is a centralized offering and sidesteps using blockchain, although it supports Ethereum smart contracts. 

The work is part of Project Hamilton, an initiative in conjunction with the Boston Federal Reserve and the source code is released under the umbrella of openCBDC.

It claims to have sufficient scale for most potential central bank applications, although it is very much a research project rather than pilot or production ready.

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MIT Digital Currency Initiative introduces at-scale, programmable CBDC platform

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) has introduced the experimental PArSEC platform. PArSEC — short for "parallelized architecture for scalably executing smart contracts" — is open source and developed with central bank digital currency (CBDC) in mind. 

The developers highlighted the platform’s speed. It performed 118,000 ERC-20 transactions per second on 128 hosts — exceeding public permissionless blockchains, they said. The platform was thus capable of handling cross-border contracting and could be used to innovate supply chains and compliance checks as well.

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