The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is on the hunt for a new director of product management for Project Hamilton, its ongoing central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot program.
The new director will work to “forward the Federal Reserve System’s efforts to build, manage, and test software to further its understandings of digital currency…[and] continue our efforts to build a hypothetical general purpose digital currency,” according to an online job posting.
In partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Digital Currency Initiative, the Boston Fed has been researching CBDC technology since August 2020.
The project was initially slated to run two to three years. In September, Boston Fed senior vice president Jim Cunha said the project’s initial stages were “basically done,” but the search for a new director signals that the work is far from over.
Alongside the Digital Dollar Project – led by former Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chair Chris Giancarlo – Project Hamilton is one of several large-scale attempts to develop and test a CBDC in the United States.
But progress is slow going, especially when compared with the research and implementation of CBDCs outside of the United States, and Fed Chair Jerome Powell has been reticent about the Fed’s stance on whether it intends to issue a CBDC.
As private stablecoins like Tether and USD Coin continue to grow in popularity, many on Capitol Hill have raised concerns about their financial backing. Others have expressed doubts about whether private stablecoins and CBDCs can coexist.
