#digital currency initiative

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Digital Currency Initiative (MIT DCI) and Kinexys Digital Payments at J.P. Morgan collaborated on the research and development of a prototype for payment tokens on EVM-based blockchains. This research focuses on

In this whitepaper, we explore the challenges that financial institutions face when issuing assets on public blockchains. The infrastructure that traditional finance runs on today is fundamentally different from public blockchains, and this new envir

“There’s something to cold hard cash. You can hold it; you can smell it; it feels a certain way in your pocket. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump directed the Treasury Department to stop minting pennies. What happens as the world of currency

2025 marks a milestone year for the Digital Currency Initiative — our 10th anniversary. Founded in 2015, DCI began with a simple but ambitious mission: to advance open-source, neutral digital currency technologies that empower individuals. A decade i

The Crucial Promise: Stablecoin issuers offer a simple proposition: send one dollar to the stablecoin issuer in exchange for a digital token that represents that dollar on a blockchain. That stablecoin, for example, can be used as a payment tool or

Stablecoins are an extension of today’s monetary system and share many attributes with legacy finance. However, a nuanced analysis reveals crucial differences in financial and technical vulnerabilities. In our latest post from the MIT DCI, we explore

Stablecoin issuers hold a significant amount of US Treasury securities, which is a conventionally conservative strategy. But even the Treasury markets can be susceptible to strain, and if stablecoins grow large enough, a run could cause these markets

Neha Narula, Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, joined Bloomberg’s Crypto this week to reflect on the recent $19 billion wipeout in digital assets—now the largest crypto liquidation event on record. “Crypto is still a

In this issue: We launched DCI Global, a global research and education network; Updates on Bitcoin and stablecoins research; Special thanks to Madars Virza, after 8 years at the DCI; And more ...