Quick answer: Project Hamilton was a technical research collaboration between the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the MIT Digital Currency Initiative that studied how a central bank digital currency (CBDC) could work at scale. It built open-source software that demonstrated up to 1.7 million transactions per second. It was research only, not a pilot, and not a decision to issue a US CBDC.
Updated 07/17/2026. By Jake Claver. Educational content, not investment advice.
A quick clarification, because the topic gets muddled: Project Hamilton was about the money layer, the plumbing a digital dollar might run on, not trade paperwork or shipping documents. It answered a narrow engineering question: if a central bank wanted to move money digitally at national scale, what would the transaction processor look like, and how fast could it go? Here is what the actual sources show.
What Project Hamilton was
According to the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, Project Hamilton was set up “to help policymakers, researchers, and technologists better understand the technical opportunities, challenges, risks, and tradeoffs associated with designing digital public money at national scale.” MIT DCI is explicit that the work was “not intended as a pilot or for public deployment.”
The collaboration produced OpenCBDC-tx, an open-source codebase, along with technical papers and a peer-reviewed systems paper published at USENIX in April 2023. The project concluded in 2023 and, per MIT DCI, “is no longer actively maintained.” The Boston Fed documented Phase 1 in a public executive summary and a full whitepaper.
The two designs, and the numbers
The technical heart of Hamilton was two different transaction-processing architectures. The OpenCBDC-tx repository reports both:
- Atomizer architecture: maximum demonstrated throughput around 170,000 transactions per second, with geo-replicated latency under two seconds. It “requires vertical scaling,” meaning throughput is limited by a single component.
- Two-phase commit architecture: maximum demonstrated throughput around 1.7 million transactions per second, with geo-replicated latency under one second. Its “peak transaction throughput scales horizontally with the number of nodes.”
For scale, the 1.7 million-per-second figure is far beyond typical card-network peak volumes, which is the point: the research was probing the ceiling of what a central-bank money system could handle, not building a shippable product.
Research, not a rollout
This is the part most worth internalizing. Project Hamilton did not recommend issuing a CBDC, and it was not a Federal Reserve commitment to build one. The Federal Reserve, separately, has said the same about US policy: on its CBDC page, it states its discussion paper “does not favor any policy outcome” and that a CBDC would be “a liability of a central bank, like the Federal Reserve.” The Fed has not decided to issue one.
So Hamilton is best read as a lab result: it showed a design could be fast and resilient, and it left the policy question open.
A common misconception: Hamilton is not an XRP or Ripple project
Because Hamilton touches digital money, it sometimes gets bundled with specific cryptocurrencies. It should not be. The project was a Boston Fed and MIT design study built on its own OpenCBDC software, and it is not tied to XRP, Ripple, or any public token. Notably, the Hamilton team found it did not need a blockchain in the conventional sense to hit its performance targets. Keeping those threads separate is part of reading the research honestly.
Why this matters
Even as a concluded research project, Hamilton set a public reference point for what high-throughput digital public money can look like, and its open-source code let other central banks and researchers build on the work. It also fits a broader institutional debate about the future of settlement. The Bank for International Settlements argues that “tokenisation could dramatically enhance the capabilities of the monetary and financial system” by removing “the traditional separation of messaging, reconciliation and settlement.” Hamilton is one concrete data point in that conversation: a demonstration that the money layer can be re-engineered for speed, with the policy choices left to elected and appointed officials.
Common questions
What is Project Hamilton?
Project Hamilton was a technical research collaboration between the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the MIT Digital Currency Initiative to study how a central bank digital currency could be built at national scale. It produced open-source software, OpenCBDC-tx, and concluded in 2023.
How many transactions per second did Project Hamilton handle?
Two architectures were built. The atomizer design demonstrated about 170,000 transactions per second with latency under two seconds, and the two-phase commit design demonstrated about 1.7 million transactions per second with latency under one second, scaling horizontally with more nodes.
Did Project Hamilton mean the US is launching a digital dollar?
No. MIT DCI states the work was not intended as a pilot or for public deployment, and it did not recommend issuing a CBDC. Separately, the Federal Reserve says its CBDC discussion paper does not favor any policy outcome and it has not decided to issue one.
Is Project Hamilton connected to XRP or Ripple?
No. Project Hamilton was built on its own open-source OpenCBDC software by the Boston Fed and MIT, and it is not tied to XRP, Ripple, or any public cryptocurrency. The team also found it did not require a conventional blockchain to reach its performance targets.
Is Project Hamilton still running?
No. The collaboration concluded in 2023. Its outputs, including the OpenCBDC codebase and research papers, remain public, but MIT DCI notes the project is no longer actively maintained.
This content is educational only. It is not tax, legal, or investment advice. Check primary sources and speak with a qualified professional before making financial decisions.
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