Posts in Research
Project Hamilton at NSDI '23
Project Hamilton at NSDI '23

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.

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Featured, Papers, ResearchCristy Stilesproject hamilton, nsdi, cbdc, OpenCBDC
MIT, Maiden Labs examine CBDC inclusiveness issues in report from 4 countries
MIT, Maiden Labs examine CBDC inclusiveness issues in report from 4 countries

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.

In spite of a growing body of work related to CBDCs, “few if any proponents have offered practical insight into how CBDC will promote greater access to financial services,” the DCI, along with the MIT Media Lab and Maiden Labs, claimed.

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Featured, Papers, ResearchCristy Stilescentral bank digital currency, cbdc, financial inclusion, Neha Narula
Nicolas Xuan-Yi Zhang, "A Multi-Currency Exchange and Contracting Platform"
Nicolas Xuan-Yi Zhang, "A Multi-Currency Exchange and Contracting Platform"

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.

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Featured, Papers, ResearchCristy StilesNicolas Xuan-Yi Zhang, Exchanges, smart contracts, encryption
The MIT Digital Currency Initiative bids farewell to Tadge Dryja
The MIT Digital Currency Initiative bids farewell to Tadge Dryja

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…

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Articles, Featured, ResearchAshley JacobsonTadge Dryja, Lightning Network
Utreexo demo release 0.2 by Tadge Dryja
Utreexo demo release 0.2 by Tadge Dryja

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.)

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Research, Articles, Featured, PapersAshley JacobsonTadge Dryja, Utreexo, Scaling bitcoin
Utreexo: A dynamic accumulator for Bitcoin state - A description of research by Thaddeus Dryja

One of the earliest-seen and most persistent problems with Bitcoin has been scalability.  Bitcoin takes the idea of "be your own bank" quite literally, with every computer on the bitcoin network storing every account of every user who owns money in the system.  In Bitcoin, this is stored as a collection of "Unspent transaction outputs", or "utxo"s, which are somewhat unintuitive, but provide privacy and efficiency benefits over the alternative "account" based model used in traditional finance.

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Featured, Papers, ResearchAshley JacobsonAccumulator, Utreexo, Tadge Dryja
Cellular structure for a digital fiat currency

This paper by DCI Reserach Scientist Robleh Ali sets out a structure for a digital fiat currency system. The primary benefit of the cellular structure is that it lowers barriers to entry for payments by using trustless intermediation between cells in the system. The larger purpose of this structure is to create an open foundation for a decentralized financial system in which competition can thrive but which cannot be captured by private interests.

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Papers, ResearchGuest Userdigital fiat currency, Robleh Ali
Blockcerts and the Digital Certificates Project

An incubation project by the Media Lab Learning Initiative and Learning Machine that builds an ecosystem for creating, sharing, and verifying blockchain-based educational certificates. Digital certificates are registered on the Bitcoin blockchain, cryptographically signed, and tamper proof. All code is open-source and we invite feedback, contributions, and general discussion.

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ResearchGuest Userverifiable claims, digital certificates, blockcerts, non-equivocation