BIS Project Agorá moves from blueprint to reality

Project Agorá, the flagship cross-border distributed ledger initiative led by the Bank for International Settlements, has entered its long-anticipated testing phase.

Project Agorá moves from blueprint to reality

After progressing from design to prototype build during 2025, the project is now moving into real-world experimentation involving seven central banks and more than 40 major financial institutions.

This shift marks a critical inflection point for one of the most closely watched attempts to modernise the plumbing of international payments.

At its core, Project Agorá seeks to integrate tokenised commercial bank deposits with tokenised central bank money — often described as wholesale central bank digital currency — within a single interoperable “network of networks”.

The ambition is not theoretical elegance, but operational relevance: solving structural frictions that have stubbornly resisted decades of reform.

Targeting the Weak Spots of Cross-Border Payments

Global policymakers, led by the G20 and the Financial Stability Board, have set clear benchmarks for improving cross-border payments: lower costs, faster settlement, broader access and greater transparency.

Progress, however, has been uneven. Agorá focuses on two particularly acute bottlenecks: compliance-driven delays and the misalignment of cut-off times and opening hours across jurisdictions.

Today’s correspondent banking model relies on sequential processing across multiple intermediaries, each introducing latency, cost and operational risk.

In contrast, Agorá is designed to enable atomic settlement — the simultaneous and irrevocable exchange of payment and settlement assets — potentially compressing transaction times from days to seconds.

A Consortium with Strategic Weight

The project brings together heavyweight participants, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and central banks from Europe, Japan, South Korea and Mexico, representing currencies that dominate global trade and financial flows.

The Institute of International Finance is coordinating private-sector input, underlining the project’s intent to bridge policy ambition with market practicality.

Crucially, Agorá operates firmly in the wholesale domain.

Despite political resistance in the United States to retail digital dollars, the project avoids consumer payments entirely, focusing instead on interbank settlement infrastructure where efficiency gains are both less controversial and more immediately measurable.

Agorá, mBridge and the Geopolitics of Payments

Although not a direct competitor, Agorá is frequently compared with mBridge, another cross-border CBDC initiative originally overseen by the BIS.

The BIS’s withdrawal from mBridge in late 2024, leaving China in a dominant position, has sharpened attention on Agorá as a Western-anchored alternative for shaping future financial architecture.

The involvement of SWIFT, which is pursuing its own blockchain-enabled upgrades, further signals that Agorá is less a standalone experiment than part of a broader re-platforming of global payments.

What Next?

The current testing phase is expected to last around six months, after which findings will be presented to policymakers.

Possible next steps include expanding participation to additional currencies, particularly those already settled through the CLS system, such as the Canadian, Australian and New Zealand dollars.

Whether Agorá evolves into production infrastructure or remains a policy proving ground, its progress underscores a simple reality: tokenisation is no longer a fringe experiment, but a central pillar in the future of cross-border payments.