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.

To study how emerging technology might safeguard consumers’ private information when making payments with a central bank digital currency, we conducted research with staff from the Bank of England over the past year. Our findings, published today, identify options for “Enhancing the Privacy of a Digital Pound.”

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.