- Project Overview: Project Agorá, led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), aims to explore how tokenisation can improve wholesale cross-border payments.
- Private Sector Participation: Over 40 private financial firms, including Standard Chartered, Mastercard, Lloyds, and JP Morgan Chase, have confirmed participation.
- Central Bank Involvement: Seven central banks, such as the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, are supporting the project.
- Design Phase: The project has entered its design phase, focusing on integrating tokenised commercial bank deposits with tokenised central bank money on a programmable ledger.
- Challenges Addressed: The initiative seeks to tackle structural inefficiencies in current payment systems, such as legal disparities across jurisdictions, varied technical requirements, and the complexity of repeated financial integrity controls.
- Building on Past Work: Project Agorá builds on findings from BIS’s previous initiative, Project Mariana, which explored the use of wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) for cross-border settlements.
