Project Agorá is the cross-border tokenised-commercial-bank-money project led by the BIS Innovation Hub together with seven central banks (Banque de France for the Eurosystem, Bank of England, Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, Bank of Mexico, Federal Reserve Bank of New York representing the USD leg, and Swiss National Bank) and a private-sector cohort of more than forty firms convened by the Institute of International Finance (IIF). The project explores a unified-ledger architecture in which tokenised commercial bank money (i.e. tokenised deposits) settles atomically against tokenised central bank money on a single programmable platform, with the structural design of replacing the conventional correspondent-banking model for cross-border wholesale payments. For an institutional tokenisation operator, Project Agorá is the most important live cross-border tokenisation programme bringing together major non-USD G7 central banks and a deep TradFi private-sector cohort, and the worked example of the unified-ledger thesis that BIS senior research has been articulating since the 2023 BIS Annual Economic Report (Project Agorá BIS reference page).
What it is
Project Agorá was announced on 3 April 2024 as a joint initiative of the seven participating central banks and the BIS Innovation Hub Switzerland Centre. The project's structural premise is that the conventional cross-border wholesale payments architecture, where commercial banks transfer funds across borders through a chain of correspondent-bank relationships with multiple intermediation steps, is materially inefficient and that a unified programmable ledger architecture can replicate the function with materially lower latency, lower cost, and lower operational risk.
The architectural design point is the unified ledger thesis: a single programmable platform on which tokenised central bank money (the wholesale CBDC layer) and tokenised commercial bank money (the tokenised-deposit layer) coexist, with smart-contract-mediated atomic settlement across the two layers. Commercial-bank participants hold tokenised-deposit balances on the platform; central-bank participants hold tokenised-CBDC balances; the platform's settlement primitives allow commercial-bank tokenised deposits to settle atomically against central-bank reserves, replicating the conventional two-tier system in tokenised form on a single programmable substrate.
The seven participating central banks were announced as Banque de France (representing the Eurosystem), Bank of England, Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, Bank of Mexico, Federal Reserve Bank of New York (representing the USD leg), and Swiss National Bank. The currency mix is structurally important: USD, EUR, JPY, GBP, CHF, KRW, and MXN cover most of the wholesale cross-border payment corridors that the conventional correspondent-banking architecture currently serves.
Operating model
Project Agorá's operating model has been articulated through public BIS Innovation Hub material, IIF private-sector cohort coordination, and adjacent academic and policy literature, with the live experimentation cycle running across 2024-2026. The private-sector cohort was convened by the IIF and announced in May 2024 with more than forty firms participating, including (per BIS and IIF disclosure) Mastercard, Visa, SWIFT, Citi, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, MUFG, State Street, and a broader set of major commercial banks, financial-market infrastructures, and payment-network operators (BIS Project Agorá participant disclosure).
The structural separation of central-bank and private-sector roles follows the conventional two-tier system. Central banks operate the central-bank-money layer of the unified ledger and supervise the participating commercial-bank cohort. Commercial banks operate the tokenised-deposit layer, holding tokenised-deposit balances as liabilities of their own balance sheets but settling atomically against tokenised central-bank money on the same platform. The financial-market infrastructure participants (SWIFT, the card networks) bring messaging, identity, and settlement-network expertise into the design conversation.
The conceptual release published in 2025 set out the unified-ledger architecture in detail and validated the design pattern across the participating central banks and private-sector cohort. The live experimentation work through 2025-2026 has tested specific architectural choices (programmable settlement triggers, identity and KYC framework integration, asset segregation across commercial-bank participants, atomic-settlement primitives across central-bank and commercial-bank money) without yet committing to a production-platform timeline. The structural read is that Agorá is in the design-and-validation phase rather than the production-deployment phase, with the question of whether a production platform follows still open.
The architectural relationship to mBridge (the multi-CBDC cross-border platform with HKMA, Bank of Thailand, PBoC Digital Currency Institute, Central Bank of UAE, and Saudi Central Bank as participants) is structurally complementary rather than competitive. mBridge operates exclusively at the wholesale-CBDC layer with commercial-bank participants on each currency leg; Agorá operates at the unified central-bank-and-commercial-bank-money layer with the seven G7-and-emerging-market central banks. The two platforms cover overlapping use cases (cross-border wholesale settlement) under different architectural patterns. Whether the two converge, interoperate, or remain structurally separate is not in current public coverage.
Why it matters
Three reasons. First, the central-bank participation. Agorá brings together the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (USD), Banque de France (Eurosystem), Bank of Japan (JPY), Bank of England (GBP), Bank of Korea (KRW), Bank of Mexico (MXN), and Swiss National Bank (CHF). The combination is the most consequential central-bank cohort to commit to a single tokenisation platform exploration outside the BIS Annual Economic Report's framing exercises, and structurally complements mBridge's APAC-and-Middle-East-anchored participant set. The two platforms together cover most of the global wholesale cross-border payment flow.
Second, the private-sector cohort depth. The forty-plus IIF-convened private-sector participants include the largest US, European, Japanese, and APAC commercial banks, the leading global financial-market infrastructures (SWIFT), the largest card networks (Visa, Mastercard), and leading custody and asset-servicing franchises (State Street, among others). The cohort depth materially distinguishes Agorá from earlier multi-stakeholder cross-border tokenisation experiments that struggled to assemble comparable private-sector participation.
Third, the unified-ledger thesis itself. The BIS senior research on tokenisation since the 2023 Annual Economic Report has positioned the unified-ledger architecture as the structural design point for next-generation programmable money infrastructure. Project Agorá is the live test of whether that thesis holds operationally with seven central banks and a deep private-sector cohort committed to the experimentation. The implications for the broader tokenisation conversation (including the Kinexys BDA model, Progmat-Japan tokenised-deposit pilots, the Project Ensemble HKD wholesale tokenisation, and the various national tokenised-deposit consortium platforms) are structurally significant: if Agorá validates the unified-ledger architecture, the design pattern becomes the reference for cross-border tokenised wholesale settlement. If it does not, the conventional correspondent-banking model retains its structural position.
The competitive map is partly mBridge on the multi-CBDC side, partly the SWIFT-led tokenised-payments interoperability work that has been positioned as a non-unified-ledger alternative, and partly bilateral central-bank settlement bridges (the BoE-MAS bridge, the Banque de France-MAS bridge, others) that test similar concepts at smaller scale.
Recent moves
- 2025-2026. Live experimentation work continued through workstream-specific testing across the participating cohort, with the question of whether a production-platform timeline follows still open.
- 25 November 2025. Tommaso Mancini-Griffoli appointed Head of the BIS Innovation Hub starting 1 March 2026, joining from the IMF where he was Assistant Director, Payments, Currencies and Infrastructure. The remit overlap with Project Agorá's cross-border tokenisation portfolio has been read as a continuity-and-emphasis signal for the project.
- 12 November 2025. Andréa Maechler, then Acting Head of the BIS Innovation Hub, delivered "How deposits can harness tokenisation" at the Singapore Fintech Festival, the most recent set-piece on tokenised deposits from the Hub leadership and structurally adjacent to the Agorá conceptual framing.
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- Conceptual release published, setting out the unified-ledger architecture in detail and validating the design pattern across the participating central banks and private-sector cohort.
- May 2024. The private-sector cohort convened by the Institute of International Finance announced with more than forty participating firms including Mastercard, Visa, SWIFT, Citi, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, MUFG, and State Street (BIS).
- 3 April 2024. Project Agorá announced by the seven participating central banks (Banque de France, Bank of England, Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, Bank of Mexico, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Swiss National Bank) and the BIS Innovation Hub Switzerland Centre.
Open questions
- Whether a production-platform timeline follows the conceptual-release-and-experimentation phase, and on what governance terms. The current design phase is structurally distinct from a production-deployment phase; the transition path is not in current public coverage.
- The interaction with mBridge. The two platforms are structurally complementary with overlapping but non-identical participating central banks; whether they remain parallel rails, integrate, or one absorbs the other is not in current disclosure.
- The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's continued participation across the political-economic cycle in the United States. The FRBNY participation was confirmed at announcement; subsequent political-economic developments around US central-bank engagement with multilateral cross-border tokenisation work have been actively debated in trade press but the formal participation status is unchanged in current public material.
- The regulatory and supervisory framework for the participating commercial-bank cohort. Tokenised deposits issued by Citi, HSBC, MUFG, Deutsche Bank, and others on a unified ledger across seven currencies require coordinated supervisory treatment that has not yet been publicly framed.
- APAC implications. Bank of Japan and Bank of Korea are participating central banks; the integration with Progmat-Japan tokenised-deposit pilots and the broader regional tokenisation infrastructure has been thinly disclosed.
- Agentic commerce posture. A unified-ledger architecture with tokenised commercial bank money and tokenised central bank money is structurally compatible with AI-agent-controlled wallet designs at the commercial-bank tokenised-deposit layer; whether the project's design framework explicitly accommodates agentic-commerce primitives has not been publicly addressed.
Related
- BIS
- BIS Innovation Hub
- Tommaso Mancini-Griffoli
- Bank of Japan
- Bank of Korea
- State Street Digital
- Citi
- HSBC
- Deutsche Bank
- MUFG
- mBridge
- Project Ensemble
- Kinexys
- Japan Progmat architecture
- Hong Kong Project Ensemble architecture
- 03 3 risk asymmetry insurance
- 08 3 cross border fnality
- Tokenisation, defined