Boston Fed Announces Plans To Design a Blockchain 'Supervisory Node'

The Federal Reserve of Boston is starting a new blockchain experiment this summer.

It has been quietly developing blockchain systems since 2016 but has said very little about their plans.

Now the first results of those trials are out and the Boston Fed published a white paper on its proof-of-concepts on ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric.

First, the Boston Fed plans to set the agenda and determine the main direction of this experiment and the work on this ideological part will start as early as this summer.

In the future, it could be possible that we will see multiple blockchains by various banking institutions, Brassil said, so the Fed's supervisory node should have a technical capacity "Broad enough to cover all the platforms."

Boston Fed started blockchain technology trials back in 2016 by experimenting with ethereum.

During that period, developers tried to put depository institution balances under the Boston Fed supervision on a blockchain and create mock transactions - a kind of a blockchain-powered back office model.

Now, with the project of the blockchain back office on hold and the "Supervisory node" experiment in the pipeline, Boston Fed is hiring some professionals to ramp up its blockchain testing, Cunha told CoinDesk.

Boston Fed is also actively talking to other monetary authority bodies, though Cunha and Brassil won't name the particular institutions.

Image of the Boston Fed office - courtesy of the Boston Fed.