BIS Project Agora Enters Testing Phase With Seven Central Banks and 41 Firms

The Bank for International Settlements' Project Agora has moved from design to prototype, testing tokenized cross-border payments with seven central banks and 41 private institutions. It is the largest coordinated experiment in wholesale payment infrastructure since Swift was founded in 1973. Whether it produces anything beyond a well-funded proof of concept remains an open question.

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 41 institutions selected through the Institute of International Finance: JPMorgan, Citi, HSBC, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, 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.

Timeline and caveats

Agora moved from design to prototype building in September 2025. Testing is underway. A Phase 1 report covering prototype design, testing results, and legal/regulatory gap analysis across all seven jurisdictions is expected in H1 2026.

There is no commitment to production deployment. The prototype explores 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.