The Bank of Canada has teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a twelve-month research project on central bank digital currencies.
The project will see the central bank and the MIT Media Lab’s digital currency initiative team experiment with potential technology approaches to determine how a CBDC could work.
The Bank of Canada has spent several years working with the country's commercial lenders to explore the creation of a DLT-based CBDC. Last year, it said that its work on a potential digital loonie has accelerated because of the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on cash usage.
Nevertheless, the bank continues to insist that "no decision has been made" on whether to roll out a CBDC.
For the MIT team, the work will build on research carried out with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
This ongoing initiative, has already produced research showing a system capable of handling 1.7 million transactions a second, without using distributed ledger technology.