The world recently got a sneak peek at what a digital dollar, or at least one component of a hypothetical United States central bank digital currency (CBDC), might look like, courtesy of Project Hamilton, a collaborative effort of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the MIT Digital Currency Initiative. The results of the project’s first phase were originally expected last summer but were released on Feb. 3. The project, announced in 2020, is named in honor of Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury secretary, and Margaret Hamilton, an MIT staffer who contributed to NASA’s Apollo program.
Researchers developed two open-source models of transaction processing software, called OpenCBDC, for the “technology-agnostic” project. The researchers note in the project’s white paper that “technical and policy choices are highly interdependent and that these choices are more granular and with more permutations than commonly discussed.” Only one of the models used distributed ledger technology, and it turned out to be the less satisfactory solution, with the technology described as “not needed.”