The Bank for International Settlements has published the prototype report for Project Agorá, its flagship cross border payments initiative exploring how tokenization and programmable ledgers could overhaul the correspondent banking model. The project brought together seven central banks and more than 40 financial institutions including JPMorgan, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Swift, Mastercard and UBS in the largest BIS Innovation Hub project to date. The Bank of Canada is now joining, with additional financial institutions expected to follow. The next phase will involve real value testing with actual money moving across the system, though the initiative is still considered experimental, meaning there is no timeline for production deployment.
The seven central banks represent the major reserve currencies, with the Banque de France participating on behalf of the Eurosystem alongside the Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, Bank of Mexico, Swiss National Bank, Bank of England and Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The prototype is the culmination of two years of work. The platform is not open to retail participants.
The project targets four longstanding pain points in wholesale cross border payments. Speed, with settlement completing in seconds once funds are locked. Efficiency, through parallel rather than sequential compliance checks. Transparency, with all parties able to track payment status in real time. And risk reduction, through atomic settlement that ensures all balance updates occur or none do. The report’s qualitative assessment found these were materially or partially addressed across all nine priority friction points identified by participants.
The most consequential early design decision was the desire for central banks to retain local control. That requirement drove the entire two layer architecture. Rather than placing central bank money and deposits on a single shared ledger, Agorá separates them. Tokenized commercial bank deposits sit on a shared “unifying ledger” where all participants can coordinate. Tokenized central bank reserves sit on independent jurisdictional ledgers, one per currency area, each operated under the relevant central bank’s authority. A smart contract called the “payment coordinator,” deployed on the unifying ledger, orchestrates sequencing but never directly invokes contracts on jurisdictional ledgers. This is a fundamentally different model from mBridge, a cross border payment project the BIS previously was involved with.
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