What’s new at DCI?
Latest Newsletter
2025 marks a milestone year for the Digital Currency Initiative — our 10th anniversary. Founded in 2015, DCI began with a simple but ambitious mission: to advance open-source, neutral digital currency technologies that empower individuals. A decade in, that mission feels more vital than ever.
In this issue:
Our 10 year anniversary
New website launched
Special thanks to software engineer Sam Stuewe
And more...
Blog Posts
On May 16, 2024, DCI collaborator Dan Aronoff presented a lecture at the MIT Industrial Liaison Program’s NextGen Security Conference entitled “Incorporating Cryptographic Methods in Economics.” DCI research scientist Madars Virza co-created the slide deck with Dan.
Financial infrastructure has long centered on assets in which the spender does not actually hold custody. But self-custody isn’t an aberration ready to be disposed of; it’s a world of potential enhancement to human self-determination! Despite the dominance of intermediated, custodied, payment platforms and shrinking cash use, the rumors of self-custody's death are (hopefully) greatly exaggerated.
A year ago I toured the gold vault beneath the New York Fed. You might recall it from the classic 1995 movie Die Hard with a Vengeance, but in case you aren’t familiar: It’s the world’s largest depository of monetary gold, storing over 6,000 tons 80 feet below Manhattan and protected by airtight vaults and its own police force.
The first thing I thought when I was down there was wow, gold is very shiny. The second was wow, gold bars are surprisingly heavy, in part because of its density (bars are 28 pounds). They make you wear metal shoe covers to hold one in case you drop it on your foot. But the third thing I thought is “THIS is what the global monetary system rests on? This is just so antiquated.”
Neha Narula, Director of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative (DCI), has been selected for the Rockefeller Foundation's 2025 Bellagio Center Residency.
As innovation in electronic payments accelerates, privacy considerations are becoming ever more important. While the generation and use of data is an intrinsic part of electronic payments and can benefit consumers and businesses, it may also present privacy concerns, particularly if there are not sufficient safeguards.
Why does innovation in financial services matter to everyone, and how can the public sector support its advancement? On Thursday, September 26, MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative was privileged to host a visit and fireside chat at the Media Lab on these questions and on the future of money with Dr. Agustín Carstens, General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland.
Madars Virza SM '14, PhD '17, a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab's Digital Currency Initiative (DCI), is the recipient of an IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Test of Time Award for “Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin,” a paper he co-authored in 2014.
On April 16, Dr. Joachim Nagel, President of the Deutsche Bundesbank, the central bank of Germany, visited the MIT Media Lab. There, he announced this new collaboration between the Bundesbank and the DCI for central bank digital currency design research.
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.
MIT DCI research scientist Daniel Aronoff shared his work on US Treasury repo markets on two occasions this fall. He spoke on the “Repo on chain and collateral mobilization” panel at the 2023 Rates & Repo North America, and participated in the NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting. You can find information about his ongoing research on this topic here, and watch a video of the panel below.
In November, MIT Digital Currency Initiative research scientist Daniel Aronoff participated in a panel discussion along with Ed Golding, Executive Director of the MIT Golub Center for Finance, on fintech and the digitization of finance at the MIT Research and Development Conference. The lively conversation touched on many topics relevant to DCI’s work, including safeguarding privacy in central bank digital currencies, decentralizing repo markets through smart contracts, and the future of cash.
On April 22-23, the MIT Bitcoin Club hosted the 10th MIT Bitcoin Expo. DCI director Neha Narula gave a keynote speech, Cryptoeconomic Systems managing editor Reuben Youngblom presented a talk titled "The 70 Megaton Gorilla: Addressing the PoW climate narrative," and DCI software engineer Sam Stuewe presented an asynchronous talk titled "Are We CBDC Yet? A Healthy Dose of Skepticism." Sam also mentored participants in the Expo's Hackathon.
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 Tuesday, January 17th at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Axios markets reporter Courtenay Brown and MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative director Neha Narula considered the most pressing issues facing cryptocurrency today including how (and if) the industry should be regulated, how governments and financial institutions should interact with the sector, and how investments could be safeguarded. The View from the Top sponsored segment featured Ripple chief executive officer Brad Garlinghouse.
On Tuesday, January 17th at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Axios markets reporter Courtenay Brown and MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative director Neha Narula considered the most pressing issues facing cryptocurrency today including how (and if) the industry should be regulated, how governments and financial institutions should interact with the sector, and how investments could be safeguarded. The View from the Top sponsored segment featured Ripple chief executive officer Brad Garlinghouse.
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.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) and associated organizations marshaled a sizable team of researchers in four low- and middle-income countries — India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Mexico — to study inclusion issues related to retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) design. They released the results of their 15-month research project on Jan. 13.
Five years ago, I was in the Boston area for a week and I hung out at the DCI.
It wasn't much of a space back then—really more like a closet. But there were ethernet ports in the walls, assorted cables, and computer accessories, and a couch with occasional undergrads hanging out, coding, or discussing the finer points of cryptocurrencies. It was welcoming, and a lot of fun. I brought a computer and started working, and talking to people about Bitcoin, and helping some students with their projects…
The Bank of England announced an agreement to collaborate on a twelve-month Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) research project with MIT Digital Currency Initiative. The agreement supports and builds on DCI’s ongoing research into CBDC, while also contributing to the Bank of England’s wider research and exploration of central bank digital currencies. While no decision has been made on whether or not to introduce a CBDC in the UK, the work will investigate and experiment with potential CBDC technology designs and approaches, and evaluate key tradeoffs, opportunities, and risks. This type of research can help inform wider policy development by contributing important technical ideas and questions.
Today, the Bank of Canada announced an agreement to collaborate on a twelve-month CBDC research project with the MIT Digital Currency Initiative. The agreement supports and builds on the DCI’s ongoing research into CBDC, while also contributing to the Bank of Canada’s wider research agenda into digital currencies and fintech. The work will investigate and experiment with potential CBDC technology designs and approaches, and evaluate key tradeoffs, opportunities, and risks. While no decision has been made on whether or not to introduce a CBDC in Canada, this type of research can help inform wider policy development by contributing important technical ideas and questions.
We’re excited to share that AJ Towns is joining the Digital Currency Initiative to lead our Bitcoin Software and Security Effort (please find his announcement below). This four-year research and development program is designed to continue to harden the Bitcoin network and steward the industry’s commitment to funding open source software. The effort will include contributing to Bitcoin Core development as well as longer-term research, such as investigations into the stability of rewards and software to provide strong robustness and correctness guarantees. It will also include attracting talent in network and operating system security, compilers, programming languages, testing, and more to join the effort.
View the DCI presentation and fireside chats from the 2021 MIT BItcoin Expo here
Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab Launches New Bitcoin Software and Security Effort with Industry Leaders
Thanks to millions of open source developer hours over the past 12 years, and a burgeoning and supportive ecosystem, Bitcoin is no longer an obscure cryptographic toy. It is now an open-source financial network that secures on the order of $1T of value.
As the use of Bitcoin grows, and as it becomes more deeply embedded into our societies, the security of the network must grow and strengthen alongside it. Yet, as a common good, there is no one single Bitcoin protector or guardian to take on this formidable task. By design, there is no central command. And while this presents significant logistical challenges, it is also the distinguishing feature perhaps most unique to Bitcoin: no central point of failure. Bitcoin's nearly-uninterrupted operation over the years is a testament to the power of decentralization…
The goal of Utreexo is to make running a full node easier, faster, and smaller, and while that’s more of an asymptote than a point on any curve, we’re getting there. Today we’ve released Utreexo demonstration 0.2, which pairs the Utreexo accumulator with a modified version of btcd(temporarily called utcd). Most of the utcd work was done by Calvin Kim, as Niklas Gögge and myself have been working on improving the accumulator and how it interacts with the bitcoin data structures. Calvin has written a post about the work as well.
This new release works more like a normal bitcoin node: it starts up, finds peers, and verifies the blockchain. There are still things it doesn’t have, like a mempool, or a way to deal with reorgs. (It currently deals with reorgs by crashing.)
Re: Comments to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network on Requirements for Certain Transactions Involving Convertible Virtual Currency or Digital Assets
FinCEN Docket No. FINCEN-2020-0020, RIN 1506-AB47
FinTech offers unparalleled opportunities for financial inclusion, on both macro and micro scales. Today, payments are embedded in platforms in ways that will upend traditional commerce; crypto payments are creating new ecosystems of inclusivity between businesses and customers; and central banks are looking at digital currency to address inclusion on a national scale. This panel discussion will run the gamut of these exciting developments.
Please join the CSIS Economics Program in partnership with the OMFIF Digital Monetary Institute for a virtual webinar. This event will feature keynote remarks from Brent McIntosh, Under Secretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Department of Treasury and Kenji Okamura, Vice Minister of Finance for International Affairs at Japan’s Ministry of Finance to discuss recent digital currency developments and what they could mean for the future of the international financial and monetary systems. The keynote will be followed by an expert panel discussion to address key issues including:
The link between digital currency, cross-border payments infrastructure, and currency usage in the international financial and monetary systems.
Technology that supports digital currency and how it can meet the design requirements, specifically of central bank digital currency.
Opportunities and risks presented by digital currency to commercial banks and established payments providers.
There are many models for “money”--account based models and tokenized money dominate many conversations, but other pathways are breaking new ground as well, including new emoney solutions and conceptions of money as an infrastructure or platform that could support new financial applications and innovations. We talk on this panel about what’s likely--and possible.
In the Media
“There’s something to cold hard cash. You can hold it; you can smell it; it feels a certain way in your pocket. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump directed the Treasury Department to stop minting pennies. What happens as the world of currency goes increasingly digital? Will traditional currencies soon become a thing of the past? And who stands to benefit, and who might this rapid shift be hurting? Neha Narula, Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, joins The Excerpt to take a closer look at this transition period for money and how it might evolve.”
“MIT DCI Director Neha Narula: How Academia Interacts With The Bitcoin Ecosystem
A talk with the director of DCI at MIT, Neha Narula, on the role academia plays in the Bitcoin ecosystem and how that might evolve over time.”
“In the West there has been significant resistance to the concept of retail central bank digital currencies (CBDC) based on ‘Big Brother’ concerns. In other words, privacy fears that the government can monitor personal payment transactions. Or sometimes, even concerns that they might attempt to control behaviors. Hence, the Bank of England and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Digital Currency Initiative (MIT DCI) published a paper exploring privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) for a possible digital pound.”
“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 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. “
“Although crypto enthusiasts may now be inclined to distance themselves from FTX, the episode reflects ‘the crypto we created,’ says Neha Narula, director of the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT.”
DCI senior advisor Chris Calabia was interviewed on his experience as a regulator, his advice for innovation, and more. Chris worked for over twenty years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Through that role and others, including as a Senior Advisor on regulatory policy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Chris has worked closely with regulators from all of the world, providing him a unique perspective not only into the mindset of US regulators, but regulators in many different socioeconomic contexts.
Potential designs may involve intermediaries in new and different ways
Central bank digital currencies potentially offer, in a digital form, the advantages of central bank money: settlement finality, liquidity and integrity. However, both offline and online commerce are susceptible to fraud and other kinds of disagreements. The existing techniques for managing fraud and disputes focus on giving users easy access to chargebacks, which relies on intermediaries to resolve disputes. Potential designs for CBDC may involve intermediaries in new and different ways, or may not use intermediaries at all, calling into question how to address fraud if CBDCs become widely used.
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,
A private research university established in 1861, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is one of the world’s most prestigious schools and ranked first in the QS World University Rankings in 2023 due to its academic and research excellence in multiple fields, including blockchain.
The Endless Thread team is excited to introduce a new mini-series: Tales from the Crypto, or three windows into the wild world of cryptocurrency. It's a landscape ripe for investors, gamblers, opportunists, and academic investigators — both online and offline. At every turn, our hosts and producers have turned to experts to make sense of this volatile, ever expanding terrain.
In the series' first installment, co-hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson dive into a viral tweet about NFTs aiding Ukrainians with the war effort against Russia, as well as plans for a crypto island paradise that was never meant to be.
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.
Last summer, a special subcommittee of the US Senate met remotely to weigh the benefits of launching a central-bank digital currency, or CBDC—something that could, if optimally designed, transform the US financial system, making it more accessible to more citizens. For senators staring intently at their laptops, this was basically the first day of digital-currency school. And to introduce them to this highly technical world, the first witness that Senator Elizabeth Warren called was MIT Digital Currency Initiative director Neha Narula.
Collaboration with Federal Reserve Bank of Boston yields progress in understanding how a digital currency might be developed in the future.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- In collaboration with a team at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, MIT experts have begun designing and testing technical research through which further examination of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) can be performed in the U.S.
The effort, known as Project Hamilton, is in an exploratory phase, and the research is not intended as a pilot or for public deployment. Instead, the researchers have explored two different approaches that could be used to process transactions, and thus could indicate the technical feasibility of a potential CBDC model. In a process involving significant design flexibility, the MIT group tested factors such as the volume and speed of transactions, and the resilience of the systems in general, among other requirements for a viable digital currency.
Nick along with A.J. Towns, Tim Ruffing and Pieter Wuille are the authors credited for writing the three BIPs that made up Taproot, the most significant Bitcoin upgrade in four years.
DCI Director Neha Narula co-authored the piece, "Why Central Bank Digital Currencies?" published in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Liberty Street Economics
“In the past year, a number of central banks have stepped up work on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs – see map). For central banks, are CBDCs just a defensive reaction to private-sector innovations in money, or are they an opportunity for the monetary system? In this post, we consider several long-standing goals of central banks in their support and provision of retail payments, why and how central banks tackle these issues, and where CBDCs fit into the array of potential solutions.”
China is beating the U.S. when it comes to innovation in online money, posing challenges to the U.S. dollar’s status as the de facto monetary reserve. Nearly 80 countries — including China and the U.S. — are in the process of developing a CBDC, or Central Bank Digital Currency. It’s a form of money that’s regulated but exists entirely online. China has already launched its digital yuan to more than a million Chinese citizens, while the U.S. is still largely focused on research.
The two groups tasked with this research in the U.S., MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, are parsing out what a digital currency might look like for Americans. Privacy is a major concern, so researchers and analysts are observing China’s digital yuan rollout.
Neha discussed her Subcommittee Hearing: Building A Stronger Financial System: Opportunities of a Central Bank Digital Currency on June 9th and DCI’s current collaborative CBDC project with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, with Scott Nover of Quartz.
MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative has launched a new academic journal, called Cryptoeconomic Systems.
It’s a step toward a more robust academic dialogue around blockchain and crypto topics
DCI Director Neha Narula took part in The New Yorker’s “How Memes Become Money” discussion. Watch the highlight reel by clicking here.
If you are trying to grasp Bitcoin and understand what China’s digital yuan means, America’s Federal Reserve is right there with you.
America’s Federal Reserve says it is in no rush to issue a digital currency, but it is coming under intense and increasing pressure to research and understand the design and potential of digital money.
Chamber of Digital Commerce's Perianne Boring and Neha Narula of MIT Media Lab explain central-bank digital currencies and what their emergence means for crypto and fiat money.
Neha Narula was interviewed for Bloomberg Quint on “What is the Future of Money?”. View the video below and read the full interview here
In an article by Forbes’s Nina Bambysheva on February 13th, 2021, Madars Virza’s paper “Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin” and Tadge Dryja’s “The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments” were named as one of “The 10 Most Important Scientific White Papers In Development Of Cryptocurrencies.
Intense interest in cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, and the Covid-19 pandemic have sparked debate among central banks on whether they should issue digital currencies of their own. Advocates argue that central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, can make cross-border transactions easier, promote financial inclusion, and provide payment system stability. Here's how central bank digital currencies could become the future of digital finance.
A new report from MIT, however, strongly argues against the idea of blockchain-based e-voting, largely on the basis that it will increase cybersecurity vulnerabilities that already exist, it fails meet the unique needs of voting in political elections and it adds more issues than it fixes.
By Hannah Lang November 4, 2020 9:30 PM
In American Banker’s weekly podcast “Bank Shot”, Neha Narula was interviewed by Hannah Lang on Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).
DCI’s Tadge took part in an episode of “What Bitcoin Did" with host, Peter McCormick, discussing the fundamental and technical differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum, scalability and use cases.
On this week's Money Movement we're joined by Visa's Head of Crypto, Cuy Sheffield; Neha Narula, the Director of MIT's Digital Currency Initiative, an institute leading research and development in crypto, digital currency and now CBDC models; and Robert Bench, AVP at the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, and a key contributor and collaborator on the future of digital currency with the Federal Reserve.
BitMex's 100x Group has awarded its last Bitcoin development grant of the year. The company has awarded a grant valued at $40,000 to Calvin Kim for his Bitcoin scalability solution, Utreexo — a project originally created by Tadge Dryja from the MIT Digital Currency Initiative.