MIT DCI Collaborating With the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to Build a Hypothetical Digital Currency

DCI will be collaborating with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to build a hypothetical digital currency.

Governor Brainard discussed the collaboration in her speech on August 13th: 

“To enhance the Federal Reserve's understanding of digital currencies, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is collaborating with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a multiyear effort to build and test a hypothetical digital currency oriented to central bank uses. The research project will explore the use of existing and new technologies as needed. Lessons from this collaboration will be published, and any codebase that is developed through this effort will be offered as open-source software for anyone to use for experimentation…”

And Federal Reserve Bank of Boston President and CEO Eric Rosengren said the following:

“We are thrilled to be working with the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT and our colleagues in the Federal Reserve System to learn the intricacies of building a CBDC platform”

The first phase of work will involve jointly building and testing a hypothetical central bank digital currency for wide-scale, general purpose use. The objective in this phase will be to determine how to architect a scalable, accessible cryptographic platform to meet the needs of a theoretical U.S. dollar CBDC, including stringent design requirements for speed, security, privacy and resiliency.

In later phases, researchers will assess technology trade-offs by coding and testing various architectures, to see how they impact the CBDC’s design goals. The research results will be published jointly, and the code will be released as open-source software, so anyone can use or continue experimenting with it.

DCI alum James Lovejoy has accepted a position as a Lead Engineer for Digital Currency Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. The DCI has an open position for a software engineer to work on this collaboration, and there will also be opportunities for MIT UROPs and graduate researchers.