BIS Project Agorá Tests Tokenised Platform for Wholesale Cross-Border Payments
Key Takeaways
- 01Project Agorá is a BIS-described public-private collaboration focused on wholesale cross-border payments.
- 02The project is testing a shared, programmable, multi-currency platform using tokenised central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits.
- 03Its intended settlement mechanism is atomic settlement of wholesale cross-border transactions.
- 04The initiative is examining compliance with rules on settlement finality, AML/CFT, and data privacy.
- 05Project Agorá is exploratory and does not itself establish a new legal or regulatory framework.
Project Agorá is a public-private initiative exploring whether a shared, multi-currency programmable platform can support wholesale cross-border payments. The project proposes recording both central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits in tokenised form on a common platform, with the objective of enabling atomic settlement of cross-border wholesale transactions while retaining the safety, trust and reliability associated with the existing banking system.
The initiative is described by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) as an examination of the desirability, feasibility and viability of this type of platform. Its focus is wholesale payments—transactions among banks and other financial institutions—rather than retail consumer payments. A multi-currency architecture would allow the platform to address transactions involving more than one currency.
A central feature under consideration is atomic settlement, meaning that the linked parts of a transaction would settle together rather than leaving one party exposed to a situation in which it has transferred an asset or payment without receiving the corresponding leg of the transaction. Project Agorá is assessing whether tokenising reserve balances held at central banks and deposit liabilities issued by commercial banks can support that result on shared infrastructure.
The project also addresses legal and regulatory requirements that would apply to tokenised forms of central bank money and commercial-bank money. It is examining whether such arrangements can comply with existing rules concerning settlement finality, anti-money-laundering and countering-the-financing-of-terrorism (AML/CFT) obligations, and data-privacy requirements.
Rather than presenting a completed payment system or a regulatory change, the project is an exploratory collaboration intended to test the operational and legal viability of the model. Its stated approach seeks to combine programmable, tokenised settlement technology with the current two-tier banking system, in which central banks provide reserves and commercial banks provide deposits.