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.”
The distributed ledger model was “not a good match” for the project due to its performance. The project assumed administration by a central actor, and the model was modified accordingly. However, it created performance bottlenecks, and the requirement that the central transaction processor maintain transaction history slowed throughput significantly. The alternative model’s two-phase commit architecture supported “a range of potential privacy options” without central storage of transaction history, although the researchers acknowledged that it presented greater challenges for auditing.
The distributed ledger model had a peak throughput of approximately 170,000 transactions per second, while the competing model, which processed transactions in parallel on multiple computers, had a throughput of 1.7 million transactions per second and showed linear…
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