Project Agorá: A Shared Programmable Platform for Wholesale Cross-Border Payments (BIS)
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published an update on Project Agorá, a public-private collaboration convened by the and the Institute of International Finance (IIF). It proposes a two-layer distributed ledger platform for wholesale cross-border payments, combining tokenized central bank reserves with tokenized commercial bank deposits linked via smart contracts. The architecture explicitly preserves correspondent banking and the two-tier monetary system — a design choice that limits ambition considerably, since the structural inefficiencies of correspondent chains (nostro prefunding costs, corridor de-risking, access inequality) remain largely intact. The principal claimed advantages — atomic settlement eliminating credit risk, and parallel rather than sequential compliance processing — are real but narrow, and address wholesale volumes where settlement failures are costly rather than the access and cost problems motivating the G20 reform agenda. FX settlement and liquidity-saving mechanisms are out of scope. Governance arrangements, settlement finality across jurisdictions, cybersecurity at production scale, and coordinated financial crime information-sharing are all unresolved, leaving the prototype considerably further from deployment than the report’s tone suggests. [BIS]
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