Project Agorá

transitioning to real-value testing

Project Agorá is a prototype developed by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) that demonstrates tokenizing central bank reserves alongside commercial bank deposits to enable atomic, round-the-clock multi-currency settlement for wholesale cross-border payments. The system runs on a unified ledger that integrates messaging, reconciliation, compliance checks, and final settlement into a single seamless operation, improving upon the current correspondent banking model. Eight central banks, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of England, along with over 40 private financial institutions, participated in the project. The project is transitioning from simulations to real-value transactions with selected currencies and market participants, with the Bank of Canada recently joining the initiative.