MIT Digital Currency Initiative introduces at-scale, programmable CBDC platform
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) has introduced the experimental PArSEC platform. PArSEC — short for "parallelized architecture for scalably executing smart contracts" — is open source and developed with central bank digital currency (CBDC) in mind.
The developers highlighted the platform’s speed. It performed 118,000 ERC-20 transactions per second on 128 hosts — exceeding public permissionless blockchains, they said. The platform was thus capable of handling cross-border contracting and could be used to innovate supply chains and compliance checks as well.
PArSEC supports ERC-20 tokens, so an automated market maker launched on the platform could transact with such assets as bonds, tokenized securities and repurchase agreements in addition to CBDCs. Because it supports virtual machines, it would simplify interactions between central and commercial banks.
The platform requires “significant” amounts of continuing research, the developers said. They pointed to security, key management and data migration tooling as areas that require refinement. Privacy was also left as an open question.
Related: Standard Chartered, PwC make case for programmable CBDC in China Greater Bay Area
Privacy of CBDCs is a particularly painful point for the crypto community, which is largely opposed to any form of CBDC. Programmability is no less controversial. The PArSEC summary stated:
That functionality is exactly what many in the crypto community object to. Crypto researcher Nikhil Raghuveera wrote in Cointelegraph in April:
Programmability allows restrictions to be placed on the uses of a digital currency, which can be useful in a decentralized finance environment. But it could enable governmental
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