Project Agorá: a shared programmable platform for wholesale cross-border payments

Project Agorá – Greek for "marketplace" – is a public-private collaboration convened by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Institute of International Finance (IIF) to explore how tokenisation and programmability can enhance wholesale cross-border payments. The collaboration included seven central banks and more than 40 regulated financial institutions.

Project Agorá has successfully delivered a prototype that 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.

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.

A Project Agorá - type solution could also unlock new capabilities, including conditional and always-on wholesale cross-border payments.