All Active Research
Bitcoin Network Development
The DCI houses key Bitcoin developers and maintainers, who conduct Bitcoin Core code review and project maintenance, maintain a long-term sustainable Bitcoin implementation, and soft-fork testing and activation improvements to the process by which proposed new consensus changes are tested. To learn more about how our team contributes to Bitcoin Core development, click here.
Other Decentralized Research
In Proof-of-Work blockchains, such as Bitcoin, miners assemble transactions into blocks and compete to solve a mining puzzle. The winner earns a block reward and its block is appended to the chain. We propose an extension to the Proof-of-Work protocol that targets an upper limit on the hashrate applied by miners in guessing solutions to the mining puzzle. Since hashrate uses electricity, the protocol places an upper bound on the energy required to operate the blockchain conditional on the hardware used by miners. The protocol uses only information that is recorded on the blockchain. It sets a hashrate upper bound target; uses mining puzzle difficulty as a signal of total hashrate and implements the policy of imposing a ceiling on the block reward when the target is exceeded. We demonstrate that this protocol pushes down energy consumption when the hashrate exceeds the target.
Central Bank Digital Currency
The DCI has created a CBDC research agenda that brings together technologists, user researchers, central banks, private companies, and academics to design central bank digital currency. The initiative seeks to design, implement, and test CBDC open source software. Ultimately, DCI aims to architect CBDCs technical landscape in service of a more accessible, trusted, fair, and resilient economy.
OpenCBDC is an open source project to engage in collaborative technical research to understand the space of designs for potential central bank digital currencies (CBDC). The first phase of Project Hamilton with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston led to the release of OpenCBDC-tx, a research codebase under a larger open source project called OpenCBDC.
The goal of this global open source codebase is to help central bankers, policymakers, academics, and others make decisions on how this technology might be developed while promoting neutral, collaborative global research. Through OpenCBDC we also hope to engage a global community in research and development to learn how digital currency systems can be designed to best advance privacy, user agency, innovation, and financial equity.
PArSEC is the result of the DCI’s latest research on flexible technical architectures for centralized digital currency at scale. PArSEC supports a wide class of smart contract runtimes, including the Ethereum Virtual Machine. It supports flexible research and testing: the system can support clients easily updating their contracts’ logic, or even switching to different smart contract runtimes, without having to understand and alter the core architecture of the underlying transaction processor. Our research focused on smart contracts because they provide the highest degree of expressivity and functionality to users. In addition to a research paper and executive summary, PArSEC is free and open source software, publicly available on GitHub.