The researchers revealed results from “Project Hamilton,” that was 1st declared in 2020 to explore the utilization of existing and new tech to make and check a hypothetical CBDC platform. 


Theoretical analysis into a central bank Digital Currency (CBDC) within the U.S. has found that distributed ledger design has “downsides.” 

The Federal Bank of Boston and therefore the Digital Currency Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed their findings of their initial analysis into a CBDC on Feb three. 

The research, dubbed “Project Hamilton,” tested a “hypothetical general purpose CBDC” exploitation 2 potential models. 

The first one processed transactions through “ordering server” distributed ledger technology (DLT), that organized the valid dealingss into blocks to make an ordered transaction history. 

The researchers were ready to use this design to complete over 99% of transactions in below 2 seconds and therefore the majority of transactions in below 0.7 seconds. 

However, the ordering server resulted in a range of problems because of being run below the management of one actor, the researchers closing that “a distributed ledger design has downsides. “ 

“For example, it creates performance bottlenecks, and requires the central transaction processor to maintain transaction history, which one of our designs does not, resulting in significantly improved transaction throughput scalability properties."

They added that despite exploitation concepts from blockchain technology, a “distributed ledger operating under the jurisdiction of various actors wasn't required.” 

The second design processed transactions in parallel on multiple computers, instead of counting on one ordering server to prevent double spends. The researchers wrote that though “this ends up in superior scalability,” it didn't “materialize an ordered history for all transactions.” 

It incontestable output of 1.7 million transactions per second with 99% of transactions durably finishing in underneath a second, and therefore the majority of transactions finishing in under half a second.

(Keira Wright, Cointelegraph, 2022)