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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