The latest development of fed digital currency

since 2016 From the year onwards , Central bank digital currency （Central Bank Digital Currency,CBDC） It has gradually become an important subject of research and development experiments of central banks around the world . From the application scenario , Universal CBDC For retail 、 online shopping 、 Personal payment, etc , It basically corresponds to the cash scenario , It is the main research direction at present . in addition , There are also reserves of financial institutions CBDC etc. .

The Federal Reserve has been cautious in exploring digital currency , Once suppressed Facebook Of Libra project . But it has been exploring and studying itself , It mainly includes its financial laboratory and the authorized Boston branch “ Hamilton （Hamilton）” project .

notes ： The name of the project is to commemorate two people ： Alexander · Hamilton （Alexander Hamilton） He was the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States , The founder of the financial system . Margaret · Hamilton （Margaret Hamilton）, Director of software engineering, instrument laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Participated in the software development of Apollo program .

Hamilton Project

“ Hamilton ” The project is a collaboration between the Boston branch of the Federal Reserve and the monetary research center of MIT , It belongs to an exploratory research project .

The project is divided into two phases ：

• The first stage ： Solve high performance 、 Reliable transaction 、 Scalable 、 Core issues such as privacy protection . The goal is 10 ten thousand TPS, Second level confirmation , Multi region fault tolerance .
• The second stage ： Auditable 、 Programmable contract 、 Support the intermediary layer 、 Anti attack 、 Key issues such as offline trading .

After years of hard work , The first phase has been completed this year 2 Month completion , Source code OpenCBDC Released as open source software , Mainly through C++ Development , follow MIT Open source license agreement , The project address is  mit-dci/opencbdc-tx.

Two engines were tested , Single sort node engine Atomizer（ Keep the order ） Can achieve 17 ten thousand TPS Peak value ; Parallel execution engine 2PC（ No order ） Can achieve 170 ten thousand TPS.

From the perspective of architecture, it is similar to other central bank digital money systems , It draws on the technical characteristics of blockchain and cryptocurrency .

• A centralized transaction structure is adopted , Because the central bank can provide a strong premise of trust ;
• The transaction is verified by private key signature ;
• Users use money through the wallet client ;
• Refer to the UTXO Model , The money spent will be destroyed , Then create a new currency ;
• Transaction verification and execution are decoupled , It's easier to expand .

The project is still in its early stages , The scenarios considered are very limited . The author believes that there is still a long way to go before it can be used on the ground .

At present, there are several main open issues ：

• How to implement identity verification ？ This still depends on the public-private key mechanism , Can be accelerated by specific hardware .
• How to monitor anti money laundering ？ This may be handled offline in an extended way .
• How to achieve the audit granularity of identity and transaction data ？ The main purpose is to let different characters see different granularity , This can be achieved through data isolation , Plus encryption mechanism .
• How to issue money ？ It can be exchanged directly to individuals , Secondary commercial banks can also be authorized to （ Digital RMB adopts the latter ）.
• How to integrate with the existing financial system ？ Through the transaction gateway , Or don't get through at all , Go your own way .

summary

In fact, objectively speaking , Under the premise of centralized architecture , Adopt the existing software and hardware system , It is not difficult to implement a high throughput trading system . The difficulty is to support complex financial businesses , Multi transaction Association , Can expand , And compliance 、 Auditable 、 Conflicting needs to protect privacy . These often require a lot of practical experience .

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