BIS Project Agora Testing Continues as Phase 1 Report Slips Toward Q2

The Bank for International Settlements' Project Agora entered its testing phase in January 2026 with seven central banks and 43 private institutions. Four months in, the Phase 1 report that BIS long signalled for H1 2026 has not appeared. Testing is reportedly planned to run roughly six months, which means any public results document is likely a Q2 or Q3 2026 event. Agora remains the largest coordinated experiment in wholesale payment infrastructure since Swift was founded in 1973, and the delay does not suggest problems so much as the honest difficulty of running a multi-jurisdiction prototype across seven legal systems.

Who is in the room

Seven central banks: Bank of France (representing the Eurosystem), Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, Bank of Mexico, Swiss National Bank, Bank of England, and Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The private side includes 43 institutions selected through the Institute of International Finance: JPMorgan, Citi, HSBC, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, Santander, Monex, Swift, Visa, Mastercard, Euroclear, and SIX Digital among them.

The architecture uses a "network of networks" model that integrates tokenized commercial bank deposits with wholesale CBDC on programmable platforms. Atomic settlement through smart contracts. AML and sanctions checks embedded programmatically rather than bolted on after the fact. The BIS describes it as exploring whether tokenization can solve the pre-funding problem that makes current cross-border payments slow and expensive.

What happened to mBridge

BIS withdrew from Project mBridge in late 2024, the multi-CBDC platform built with the Bank of Thailand, Central Bank of UAE, PBoC, and HKMA. The withdrawal left China in a dominant role, which elevated Agora as the Western-anchored alternative for tokenized cross-border settlement. The timing was not coincidental.

Project Rialto, a smaller BIS initiative exploring FX solutions for retail cross-border payments using an automated market maker, involves France, Italy, Malaysia, and Singapore. It overlaps with Agora's objectives but targets different transaction types.

What comes after Phase 1

Agora entered the testing phase in January 2026. The Phase 1 report will cover prototype design, testing results, and legal/regulatory gap analysis across all seven jurisdictions. As of mid-April 2026, the BIS Agora page still lists "expected in the first half of 2026" without a more specific date.

Possible next steps under discussion include adding CAD, AUD, and NZD currencies (those settled through CLS). There is no commitment to a Phase 2 or to production deployment. The prototype is exploring whether liquidity-saving mechanisms (netting) can reduce the pre-funding requirements that make current correspondent banking slow and capital-intensive. Whether seven central banks with different monetary policy frameworks, legal systems, and political priorities can agree on a shared infrastructure is a question that technology alone cannot answer, and the report timing suggests the answer is taking longer to draft than expected.