On April 27, DCI director Neha Narula spoke at Consensus 2023 on private and public money and the role of blockchain technology in future digital payment systems.

James Lovejoy, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, presented "Hamilton: A High-Performance Transaction Processor for Central Bank Digital Currencies" at NSDI '23. This paper was co-authored by Madars Virza, Cory Fields, and Neha Narula of the DCI and James Lovejoy, Kevin Karwaski, and Anders Brownworth of the FRBB, and it proposes the Hamilton transaction processor, one of the primary results of this collaboration.

The featured image on this post is by Thomas Hawk, and used under a Creative Commons license.

DCI researcher Reuben Youngblom gave a talk on blockchain ethics at ETHDenver. As blockchain becomes more impactful in the world, our obligation to make sure that we are proceeding in a responsible manner increases. But what does a responsible future look like?

The featured image on this post is by Timothy Actwell and used via a Creative Commons license.

On this episode of “Money Reimagined,” Michael Casey, solo in Davos, Switzerland, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum, speaks with Neha Narula, the director of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative to discuss the trends of both digitalization and innovation pertaining to stablecoins, digital currencies and the future of public money,

The DCI’s Nicolas Xuan-Yi Zhang coauthored a paper at IMF on multi-currency exchange.

Cross-border payments can be slow, expensive, and risky. They are intermediated by counterparties in different jurisdictions which rely on costly trusted relationships to offset the lack of a common settlement asset as well as common rules and governance. In this paper, we present a vision for a multilateral platform that could improve cross-border payments, as well as related foreign exchange transactions, risk sharing, and more generally, financial contracting. The approach is to leverage technological innovations for public policy objectives. A common ledger, smart contracts, and encryption offer significant gains to market efficiency, completeness, and access, as well as to transparency, transaction and compliance costs, and safety. This paper is a first step aiming to stimulate further work in this space.

A Consensus panel from Austin, Texas, "Money Reimagined" host Michael Casey starts off the introductions of an important discussion with Emily Parker, CoinDesk's executive director of global content; the Honorable J. Christopher Giancarlo, dubbed “CryptoDad,” served as 13th Chairman of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission; and Neha Narula is the Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, to discuss the social and geo-political implications of the rise of international competition between central bank digital currencies, stablecoins and native crypto currencies.