What is Project Agorá?

Project Agorá is a BIS experiment testing whether banks could settle cross-border payments on one shared, programmable ledger. Agorá is Greek for marketplace.

Today a payment from one country to another passes through a chain of correspondent banks, each keeping its own records, so it can take days and cost a lot. Agorá puts two kinds of money on a single "unified ledger": tokenized central bank reserves, which banks use to settle with each other, and tokenized commercial bank deposits, which is the money customers hold. Because everything sits on one ledger, a payment and its settlement can happen in a single step.

Seven central banks take part, including the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of France for the eurozone and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, along with more than 40 private financial firms brought together by the Institute of International Finance.

Unlike mBridge, Agorá does not replace the banks in the middle. It aims to make correspondent banking work better rather than do away with it. It is the clearest sign yet that central banks see tokenization as part of the future plumbing of money.