A joint research effort between the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology into the technical feasibility of a potential central bank digital currency is now complete.

The Boston Fed’s work on CBDC with MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative is known as Project Hamilton. Early this year, Project Hamilton published its research on a transaction processor for a theoretical high-performance and resilient CBDC. The processor was developed as open-source research software, called OpenCBDC, and project leaders urged global contributors to continue working on it.

OpenCBDC is a core processing engine for money that focuses on security, performance, scalability, and flexibility. It provides a codebase that supports 1.84 million transactions per second and settlement – meaning the transaction is completed – of under one second.

After the whitepaper and code were released, Project Hamilton researchers added functionality to OpenCBDC (for instance, programmability and audit capabilities) that may be useful to evaluate a potential CBDC.