Project Agorá, the BIS cross border DLT payments initiative involving seven central banks and 40 financial institutions, has entered the testing phase according to a Reuters report. The last update provided by the BIS in September 2025 noted the project had moved from the design phase to building the prototype. Agorá involves integrating private sector tokenized deposits and tokenized central bank money or wholesale CBDC within the same network of networks.
Beyond this development, few additional details have emerged, with a full project report not expected until testing concludes. However, the initiative addresses critical cross border payment challenges worth examining.
The G20 set a series of goals to improve cross border payments in terms of access, cost, speed, and transparency, and progress to date has been underwhelming. Two critical issues that Agorá is targeting are compliance delays and differences in cut off times and opening hours impacting payment speed.
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