Project Agorá
Web3 / regulatory frameworks
Project Agorá is a Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub initiative developing a shared programmable platform for wholesale cross-border payments that combines tokenised central bank reserves with tokenised commercial bank deposits in a single unified-ledger architecture. The project was launched in 2024 and concluded its prototype phase with publication of the final report "Project Agorá: a shared programmable platform for wholesale cross-border payments" (BIS Paper othp110) on 27 May 2026. The BIS announced concurrently that the project will advance to a next phase of real-value testing rather than continuing solely as a prototype workstream.
The project is conducted with seven central banks — the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of England, the Banque de France (representing the Eurosystem), the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico, and the Swiss National Bank — with the Bank of Canada joining for the forthcoming real-value phase. The Institute of International Finance (IIF) convenes the private-sector participation, which includes more than 40 financial institutions: among them Banco Santander, BBVA, BNP Paribas, BNY, CaixaBank, Citi, Commerzbank, Crédit Agricole CIB, Deutsche Bank, Eurex Clearing, Euroclear, Groupe BPCE, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Lloyds Banking Group, Mastercard, Mizuho Bank, MUFG, NatWest, and PostFinance. The architecture combines messaging and value transfer on a single platform, supports atomic multi-currency settlement with finality across all seven jurisdictions, and is designed as a modular, always-on, programmable system in which central banks retain national-currency autonomy within an interoperable shared infrastructure.
Why It Matters
Agorá is the most advanced central-bank-money tokenisation programme in the international wholesale payments stack. Its move toward real-value testing places it ahead of comparable national CBDC programmes in terms of cross-jurisdictional settlement readiness, and it functions as the central-bank-money settlement layer that pairs structurally with the BIS Project Aperta data portability layer and with commercial-bank-money stablecoin issuers such as Qivalis.
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