TBC and MIT’s Central Bank Digital Currency Research: The Complete Form of Programmable Money

Once asset tokenization and a fully established AI economy are in place, what kind of money does the world really need?

MIT’s Central Bank Digital Currency research has already provided half the answer. The Hamilton Project built a CBDC prototype using a data structure similar to UTXO and recorded a peak throughput of 1.7 million TPS.

This choice is significant in itself: it confirms that UTXO is the right foundation for digital currency. But the Hamilton Project is still missing a crucial part—at the token contract layer. Without a contract layer, it’s impossible to support the core scenarios that define programmable money: conditional payments, designated-use fund circulation, and automatic tax withholding. AI agents have no nationality, machines have no passports, and no single country’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) can carry a cross-sovereignty small-payments market.