Project Agora

A cross-border payment passes through a chain of correspondent banks, each with its own ledger and its own cut-off times, and each step is a separate message that has to be reconciled. Agorá, Greek for marketplace, puts the money of several currencies and several banks on one platform. The BIS describes it as a multi-currency shared programmable platform for wholesale cross-border payments, convened with the Institute of International Finance, with eight central banks and more than 40 financial institutions taking part, as its project page lists.

The BIS does not present Agorá as a replacement for correspondent banking, as Cointelegraph's report on the project paper notes. The design keeps the two-tier system in which central banks issue reserves and commercial banks issue deposits, which the BIS sees as the line between Agorá and stablecoins.

The platform combines a unifying ledger with jurisdictional ledgers. Tokenized central bank reserves and tokenized commercial bank deposits are recorded on it, and smart contracts carry the workflow: compliance checks, conditional payment triggers and the settlement of both legs. Messages follow ISO 20022, with pacs.008 and pacs.009 for payments and camt.053 for statements, so the platform can exchange data with the RTGS systems and core banking systems banks already run. The aim is atomic settlement that can run around the clock. The project also examines settlement finality, anti-money laundering checks and data privacy.

The concept of a unified ledger was first proposed by the BIS. The Eurosystem asks the same design question in its Appia track, which weighs one shared network against several interconnected ones.

The BIS project page reports a real-value test in July 2026. 28 institutions and central banks in Asia, Europe and North America ran 17 scenarios with 30 transactions worth about 800,000 Swiss francs, in Swiss francs, euros, pounds, yen, won and US dollars. The cases were single-currency payments between companies, between banks and within one group, dual-currency payments and payment versus payment for FX. From initiation to settlement a payment took about 80 seconds on average, although the prototype was not integrated with RTGS or core banking systems.

The testing central banks were the Bank of England, Banque de France for the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea and the Swiss National Bank. Among the commercial participants were Deutsche Bank and Eurex Clearing from Frankfurt and UBS, PostFinance and Basler Kantonalbank from Switzerland. SIX acted as operational facilitator and Kaleido as technology provider. The project paper, Project Agorá: a shared programmable platform for wholesale cross-border payments, came out in May 2026, and testing continues with a larger role for private firms.

Venturebloxx and Finance Loop are preparing the institutional report The Future of Money in Europe, with contributors such as J.P. Morgan Kinexys and Commerzbank on how tokenized deposits, stablecoins and CBDCs compete. Finance Loop is a strategic partner of the Digital Euro Association, whose Digital Euro Conference in Frankfurt covers wholesale CBDC and programmable money. The German counterpart to Agorá's deposit side is the Commercial Bank Money Token of Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, DZ Bank, UniCredit and Helaba, described on the page on tokenized deposits.

A project of the BIS Innovation Hub, convened with the Institute of International Finance, in which eight central banks and more than 40 financial institutions test wholesale cross-border payments on one shared programmable platform with tokenized reserves and tokenized deposits.

The real-value test involved the Bank of England, Banque de France for the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea and the Swiss National Bank, plus banks such as Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, CaixaBank, UBS, Citi and JPMorgan Chase, and Eurex Clearing. The BIS project page has the full list.

No. The platform records tokenized central bank reserves and tokenized commercial bank deposits in national currencies. The BIS names Kaleido as technology provider and SIX as operational facilitator; no cryptocurrency is part of the design.

A unified ledger is a shared programmable platform on which central bank money, commercial bank money and other tokenized assets sit side by side, so that a payment and the asset it pays for can settle in one step. The BIS proposed the concept, and Agorá tests it for cross-border payments.