According to TechFlow, the Bank of Italy released a report announcing the open source of a permissioned consensus protocol FBFT based on Bitcoin improvements, aimed at studying the central bank's distributed ledger technology (DLT) system.
The protocol combines the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) algorithm and the FROST signature scheme to ensure consensus while protecting the confidentiality of the validator's identity.
The Bank of Italy said its goal is to lay the foundation for a DLT payment system operated by multiple central banks. The report also mentioned that the research team plans to further explore areas such as Bitcoin's L2 payment channel network, payment privacy, asset tokenization, and cross-border payments.
The researchers chose to conduct their research based on Bitcoin rather than Ethereum, believing that Bitcoin is more focused on digital payments and is easy to expand off-chain through a payment channel network. Although acknowledging that there is still a long way to go before the DLT payment system becomes a de facto standard, the research team likened Bitcoin to an "open standard" in the encryption field, analogous to the TCP/IP protocol in the Internet field.
