Project Hamilton was a collaboration between the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, MIT Digital Currency Initiative, and provided a preview of what a virtual dollar (or at least one part) of a hypothetical United States central banks digital currency (CBDC). The results of the project’s first phase were originally expected last summer but were ReleasedFebruary 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 Developped 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.”