Boston’s Federal Reserve says it has solved technical challenges of a ‘digital dollar’

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It could settle payments in under two seconds and handle 1.7 million transactions a second.

The US Federal Reserve is continuing its research into a “digital dollar” and has unveiled a technical specification for how it might work, The Washington Post has reported. Researchers designed a system that can handle more than 1.7 million transactions a second and settle payments in under two seconds, while operating 24/7 without service outages, according to a new paper on the subject.

The “Project Hamilton” research into a central bank digital currency (CBDC) was developed strictly to test the feasibility of a digital currency and not to give any recommendations as to whether the Fed should create one. It’s based on the open-source research software OpenCBDC, according to the researchers from MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

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