The Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS) Project Agorá has delivered a working prototype of a unified ledger for wholesale cross‑border payments, two years after the BIS first proposed the concept. 

The prototype demonstrates that tokenised commercial bank deposits and tokenised central bank reserves can operate together on a shared, programmable platform, enabling atomic, multi‑currency settlement that could run on a 24/7 basis.

The initiative—a large‑scale public‑private collaboration convened by the BIS and the Institute of International Finance (IIF)—brought together seven central banks and more than 40 regulated financial institutions, including the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of France (representing the Eurosystem), the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico and the Swiss National Bank. The Bank of Canada has now joined the next phase of work.

By leveraging smart contracts, the platform allows financial institutions to embed workflow logic, compliance requirements and conditional payment triggers directly into transactions. This reduces reconciliation burdens, manual intervention and other operational frictions that slow today’s cross‑border payments.

The BIS said the prototype also shows how wholesale CBDCs (wCBDCs) can be integrated with tokenised commercial bank deposits within a shared, programmable financial market infrastructure.

The project will now advance to further testing, including real‑value transactions involving selected currencies and participants, with an expanded role for private‑sector institutions.

Key findings 

The report, Project Agorá: A shared programmable platform for wholesale cross‑border payments, highlights several findings with significant operational implications for financial institutions:

• Tokenisation can address structural inefficiencies in wholesale cross‑border payments: The prototype shows that multi‑currency settlement using tokenised central bank reserves and tokenised commercial bank deposits can be executed safely and efficiently.

• Atomic settlement is achievable across currencies and jurisdictions: The platform enables “all‑or‑nothing” settlement, eliminating settlement risk. This has major operational implications: firms must lock liquidity before execution, redesign intraday liquidity management, and adapt treasury operations to an always‑on settlement environment.

• Workflow redesign moves compliance and data alignment before settlement: Smart‑contract‑based workflows allow sanctions screening, AML/CFT checks and fraud controls to run in parallel, reducing late‑stage failures.
This shifts firms toward pre‑validated, pre‑aligned payment flows, requiring updates to compliance orchestration and payment‑routing processes.

• Settlement finality is legally achievable across all participating jurisdictions: The report finds that a unified “atomic settlement trigger” can serve as the legally recognised moment of finality. This will require new technical, operational and contractual frameworks to align with national laws.