Project Agorá

News

Published on

16/06/2026

Updated on

16/06/2026

Reading time

2 min

A total of seven central banks, along with more than 40 of the world’s largest financial institutions and market infrastructures, are collaborating on Project Agorá under the leadership of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Institute of International Finance (IIF). It can certainly be described as a mammoth project.

How Project Agorá is transforming the financial sector

Cross-border high-value payments are largely executed via the correspondent banking system and are often slow, expensive, and opaque. Complex, sequential processes, delayed transactions, and fragmented liquidity burden cash management, slow down global trade, and stifle innovation. The goal of Project Agorá is to fundamentally overcome these structural inefficiencies through tokenization.

A unique global collaboration

What makes Project Agorá special is its sheer scale and close global collaboration. The project brings together eight central banks—including the issuers of five major reserve currencies—and over 40 leading private financial institutions. Together, they are testing a programmable, cross-currency platform. On this shared infrastructure, both central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits are being tokenized. This innovative approach makes it possible to preserve the security, trust, and reliability of the existing banking system while simultaneously placing it on an entirely new technological foundation.

An overview of the technological advantages

The successful development of an initial prototype already impressively demonstrates the enormous potential of this new architecture:

Atomic settlement: In the future, large-value cross-currency transactions can be settled immediately and simultaneously. With appropriate implementation, this could take place around the clock, seven days a week (24/7).
Smart Contracts: Through the platform, financial institutions can integrate complex business logic, compliance requirements (such as anti-money laundering measures), and conditional payment mechanisms directly into the transactions.
Radical increase in efficiency: The shared-platform model drastically minimizes the need for reconciliation and error-prone manual interventions. This eliminates the primary causes of delays, costs, and payment defaults in the current system.

Next phase: Real-Value Testing

Starting from May/June 2026: The project is entering the real-value testing phase. The participants—including the ECB (Eurosystem), the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico, the Swiss National Bank, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and over 40 financial institutions—now aim to examine how an Agora-like platform can function within existing legal and regulatory frameworks.
September 2026: Planned go-live of Pontes, an infrastructure designed to connect market DLT platforms with TARGET Services. This could serve as a key interface for the Eurozone during the subsequent testing phase.

A detailed public schedule with concrete milestones for the real-money testing phase is not yet available. BIS emphasizes that this is an experimental project intended not to deliver a finished product, but rather to develop public goods for the central banking community.

This YouTube video provides a brief overview of Project Agorá:

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