Project Agora is a cross-border wholesale payments initiative led by the Bank for International Settlements with several central banks and private financial institutions. It explores integrating tokenised commercial-bank deposits with tokenised central-bank money on a unified programmable ledger to improve cross-border settlement. It is a flagship experiment in the tokenisation of the monetary and financial system.
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- The project tests a unified ledger in which different forms of money coexist as programmable tokens, aiming to reduce friction, cost, and settlement risk in correspondent banking. By combining tokenised deposits and wholesale central-bank money with smart-contract automation, it probes how regulatory compliance, FX, and finality can be embedded directly into the settlement layer.