What is also significant are the seven central banks, which BIS said represented the world's major convertible currencies, convened in April 2024 to develop Project Agorá as a public-private initiative:

Banque de France (for the Eurosystem)
Bank of Japan
Bank of Korea
Bank of Mexico
Swiss National Bank
Federal Reserve Bank of New York (via its New York Innovation Center)
Bank of England

The IIF brought a group of more than 40 regulated financial institutions. More central banks are poised to come on board.

Why is Agorá globally significant for trade and geopolitics?

Before Agorá, China was the frontrunner in leveraging digital currency for cross-border trade through the digital yuan (e-CNY) and Project mBridge, a central bank digital currency (CBDC) platform that China began collaborating in 2021 with the BIS to develop together with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Hong Kong, Thailand, and Saudi Arabia. mBridge aimed to create an alternative global digital payment system, in part due to rising concerns over the US using the West-dominated SWIFT global network to deploy financial sanctions or exclusion of targeted financial institutions from cross-border money transfers. The Chinese-led project, active and live since late 2024, also provides China greater infrastructure to internationalize its renminbi (RMB).

In October 2024, the BIS withdrew from Project mBridge. Analysts viewed the withdrawal as part of geopolitical concerns that the technology was being positioned by states like Russia as a weapon against US sanctions.¹

Agorá’s entrance with the backing of major financial institutions of the West now threatens to upstage mBridge. It could also serve as a means of encouraging the Chinese to consider how it might join Agorá. China’s central bank and Chinese commercial banks were not part of Agorá. The two systems are not considered direct rivals, but are not interoperable.

Agorá challenges mBridge’s "inefficiency" argument. China and other nations promoted mBridge to developing nations by highlighting the slowness, high fees, and friction of the US dollar-centric correspondent banking system. By tokenizing the existing G7 financial architecture and delivering instant, low-cost cross-border payments, Agorá neutralizes the key selling point for third-party countries to adopt mBridge.²

If the Western system becomes just as fast and cheap as mBridge, most of the world, including trade, will likely default to the massive liquidity of the US dollar (and, to a lesser extent, the euro). This slows the internationalization of the renminbi.³

What’s new about Agorá?

Prior to Agorá and compared to mBridge at the time, the West’s cross-border payments system was burdened by structural inefficiencies that make transactions slow, costly, and opaque. Sequential processing across multiple financial intermediaries delays payments, increases costs, and limits end-to-end visibility. Differences in operating hours and systems further delays and increases settlement risk.

Agorá leverages smart contracts to allow financial institutions to embed workflow logic, compliance requirements, and conditional payment triggers directly into financial transactions. The BIS says this reduces reconciliation burdens, manual intervention, and other operational frictions, all of which delayed the existing cross-border system, made it costlier, and caused payment failures.

A Project Agorá-type solution is built to accommodate new capabilities including conditional and always-on wholesale cross-border payments.

How it’s done today:

How it’s done in the Project Agorá prototype:

What are the key features of the prototype?

Atomic settlement: Atomic settlement ensures all balances update or none at all, eliminating settlement risk. The prototype shows that atomic settlement is achievable in tokenized central bank reserves and tokenized commercial bank deposits across all seven participating jurisdictions.
Two-layer architecture: The prototype’s architecture consists of two blockchain layers: (i) a unifying layer that is composed of a unifying ledger where tokenized commercial bank deposits are recorded and all participants can have access; and (ii) a jurisdictional layer that is composed of independent jurisdictional ledgers where tokenized central bank reserves are recorded. This design supports jurisdictional autonomy, regulatory control and flexibility for jurisdictions in the design of their respective ledgers, while ensuring sufficient commonality across ledgers.
Privacy controls: The prototype ensures data protection and privacy on two levels: the token level and the transactional level. At the token level, privacy-preserving controls hide sensitive data, including customer information, while enabling the implementation of compliance controls. At the transaction level, privacy groups ensure that information is shared only among relevant participants in a transaction. Any data-sharing remains compliant with applicable legal and regulatory constraints.
Financial crime controls: Each institution independently and confidentially implements anti-money laundering (AML), countering the financing of terrorism (CFT), and/or anti-fraud controls and sanctions screening, while the platform ensures that all required validations are completed prior to settlement. The prototype includes functionality that would support enhanced financial crime-related information-sharing in the future.
Implementation of data standards and best practices: The prototype incorporates global payments data standards, such as legal entity identifiers (LEIs) and ISO 20022 Cross-Border Payments and Reporting Plus (CBPR+) as well as best practices including “confirmation of payee” processes, improving data consistency and payment integrity.
Settlement finality: The legal analysis highlighted settlement finality is achievable across all seven participating jurisdictions. The BIS and IIF say further work is needed, such as defining technical, operational, and contractual requirements that are best aligned with the legal frameworks in the applicable jurisdictions.
Interoperability by design: The platform is designed to operate alongside existing payment infrastructures and supports seamless cross-border workflows, ensuring that new jurisdictions and assets can be added without disrupting existing operations.

How does Agorá impact cross-border trade?

As currently prototyped, the project remains focused on compliant correspondent banking payments on blockchain with central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits. There are no corporate clients or trade finance on the platform as yet.

Still, the Agorá prototype identified areas in trade that could enhance the functionality of the prototype and unlock additional benefits. These enhancements, along with further legal and regulatory analysis, include:

More coordinated anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism
Sanctions and anti-fraud approaches
Developing liquidity-saving mechanisms
Strengthening cybersecurity posture and operational resilience
Advancing interoperability and compatibility requirements

Additional work on governance, rules and oversight — covering participation, settlement finality, data governance and risk management — are needed to support safe and scalable deployment while preserving jurisdictional autonomy, the BIS and IIF say.

There is discussion within IIF and BIS of extensibility for other uses besides wholesale cross-border payments. The project as yet does not cover the full chain of goods trade facilitation, including statements of origin and bills of lading.