Project Agorá: exploring tokenisation of wholesale cross-border payments

Updated 27 May 2026

Project Agorá is a public-private collaboration that aims to test the desirability, feasibility and viability of a multi-currency shared programmable platform for wholesale cross-border payments. It is based on a concept initially proposed by the BIS.

Cross-border payments today are burdened by structural inefficiencies that make them slow, costly and opaque. Complex, sequential processes and networks delay transactions, increase costs, limit end-to-end visibility and silo liquidity – complicating cash and treasury management.  Together these frictions weigh on global trade and financial activity, constraining innovation and growth.

Project Agorá is tackling this problem by exploring a new way to process wholesale cross-border payments using tokenisation, making these payments faster, safer, and more transparent.

By tokenising – recording central bank reserves  and commercial bank deposits  on a shared platform – Project Agorá seeks to enable atomic settlement of wholesale cross-border transactions while preserving the safety, trust and reliability of the existing banking system.  

In turn, a Project Agorá-like solution could open new possibilities for businesses, such as conditional or always-on payments, while maintaining the safety, reliability, and soundness of banking payments.

What makes Project Agorá truly unique is its combination of innovation and global collaboration at scale. It brings together eight central banks, including those of five major reserve currencies, and over 40 leading financial institutions - convened by the Institute of International Finance (IIF) - in a public-private partnership.

The prototype demonstrates that tokenised commercial bank deposits can be successfully combined with the trust and safety of tokenised central bank reserves on a shared platform. The prototype enables atomic, multi-currency settlement of wholesale cross-border payments, which could occur on an around-the-clock basis if implemented. More broadly, by leveraging smart contracts, the platform allows financial institutions to embed workflow logic, compliance requirements and conditional payment triggers directly into transactions. This promises to reduce reconciliation burdens, manual intervention and other operational frictions – key sources of delay, cost and payment failure in today's cross-border system.

In addition to its technical innovations, Project Agorá is exploring critical regulatory and legal considerations. The project is examining how tokenised central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits can comply with existing rules on issues like settlement finality, anti-money laundering/countering the financing of terrorism and data privacy.

Project Agorá is not about building a finished product but rather has delivered a prototype to evaluate the potential of this new approach. The project intends to advance testing, including conducting real-value transactions involving certain currencies and participants. 

Project participants, including central banks, have expressed strong and sustained interest in further exploring the potential benefits of the prototype. Future work is expected to involve an enhanced role for the private sector, supported by continued and active engagement from participating central banks.