The world of digital assets saw a significant rise last year. The total cryptocurrency market cap reached $3 trillion, making more people, governments and universities take a closer look at the asset class. The presence of crypto in the world’s major economies has created a big opportunity for diverse startups in the industry, leading to a massive demand for digital assets. This newly born market has helped develop more working and educational opportunities, among other things. Furthermore, some of the world’s top universities and educational institutions including MIT, the University of Oxford and Harvard University, have added pieces of the …

The Bank of Canada has partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to work on a 12 month research project focused on the design of a Central Bank Digital Currency. According to a March 16 announcement, the bank will work alongside the MIT Media Labs’ Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) team to examine how “advanced technologies could affect the potential design of a CBDC.” The Bank of Canada stated that the project is part of a broader development agenda on digital currencies, fintech and how CBDCs could work in a Canadian context. It cautions that “no decision has been made …

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 …

Theoretical research into a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in the U.S. has found that distributed ledger architecture has “downsides.” The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Digital Currency Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published their findings of their initial research into a CBDC on Feb 3. The research project, dubbed “Project Hamilton,” tested a “hypothetical general purpose CBDC” using two potential models. The first one processed transactions through “ordering server” distributed ledger technology (DLT), which organized the validated transactions into blocks to create an ordered transaction history. The researchers were able to use this architecture to …

In October 2014, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched the MIT Bitcoin Project, an initiative that sought to give away $500,000 worth of Bitcoin (BTC) to its undergraduate students. Students were able to claim $100 worth of BTC in exchange for filling out a survey, equating to roughly 0.3 BTC at the time. The project was spearheaded by students Jeremy Rubin and Dan Elitzer, who raised $500,000 from university alumni and representatives of the Bitcoin community. The project was intended to encourage exploration into digital assets and foster the campus as a global hub for crypto research. With 3,100 students …

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Digital Currency Initiative has revealed a new “Bitcoin Software and Security Effort” intended to foster research into bolstering the Bitcoin network’s defenses. The open-source initiative has received support from a diverse group of crypto industry leaders, including Gemini’s Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, MicroStrategy’s CEO Michael Saylor, Square CEO Jack Dorsey, and major European digital asset manager, CoinShares. In a blog post unveiling the project, DCI said that Bitcoin’s ascent from an “obscure cryptographic toy” to a robust network that “secures on the order of $1 [trillion] of value” was due to the millions of hours …

This is the third article in a three-part series based on Gary Gensler's extensive prior public statements on crypto. Here are parts 1 and 2. Cointelegraph has been busily digging through a treasure trove of likely future Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission Gary Gensler’s thoughts on crypto, especially from a series of lectures he gave at MIT in the fall of 2018. One especially notable element of Gensler’s thinking is his obvious respect for Bitcoin’s mechanism of internal governance and his obvious interest in seeing that decentralization elsewhere in finance. 12 years out from BTC’s genesis block, there …

Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week’s critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law. Editor's note In the United States, as President Donald Trump stonewalls any efforts at transitioning to a new administration, all eyes are on Joe Biden’s potential team and any hints as to candidates for major appointed positions. Further complicating the set up of a presidential roster is that most presidential appointments require Senate approval. The Senate, meanwhile, is waiting until January for a run-off election in Georgia to establish a majority. So, as with everything else, we in the states are …

The President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland has revealed details of the Fed’s ongoing research into a potential digital dollar. Speaking in a keynote address on September 23, Loretta Mester emphasized that the Federal Reserve has been exploring central bank digital currencies (CBDC) since before the pandemic, noting that its Board of Governors has been “building and testing a range of distributed ledger platforms to understand their potential benefits and tradeoffs.” She also noted initiatives from regional Federal Reserve branches, including a multi-year partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Boston Fed, in …

The MIT Digital Currency Initiative, or DCI, is helping the federal reserve bank of Boston build a digital currency with the goal of scaling for consumer use. The DCI’s director Neha Narula told Cointelegraph: “We're trying to build a high throughput, low latency transaction system that could be used by consumers and could handle the security and resilience required for a national currency.” The multi-year collaboration between the two organizations is still in very early stages and not much information is being released to the public. Yet the focus is not on building a newer version of interbank digital ledger, …

Blockchain and data science societies from some of the world’s most prestigious universities have joined blockchain infrastructure providers like Bison Trails as founder members of the Oasis University Program. The program, announced Aug. 13, aims to highlight and popularize the Oasis Network within this student society ecosystem. The Oasis Network is a proof-of-stake blockchain designed to enable the tokenization of data, allowing users to maintain control of what data is shared and to whom. With access to technical support, tutorials and events focused on responsible data, university groups will build apps, run validators and engage in governance on the Oasis …

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has entered into a partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to better understand the concept of digital currencies. The bank will work with MIT researchers on a multiyear project to develop and test the use cases of a “hypothetical” central bank digital currency (CBDC), said Fed Governor Lael Brainard during her speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She said that digital currencies bring both opportunities and threats related to privacy, illicit activity and financial stability, and the Reserve must clearly understand both aspects of it as they proceed towards the …