The BIS Project Agora has welcomed 41 firms aiming to advance unified ledger technologies.
To improve structural inefficiencies in international transfers, seven central banks will collaborate with major private companies.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has moved Project Agora into the design phase with the involvement of 41 private financial firms.
In April, the BIS and seven central banks launched the project to explore merging tokenized commercial bank deposits with tokenized wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) on a single platform.
Regulated private-sector participants include Visa, Mastercard, SWIFT, the Swiss SIX Digital Exchange, Japan’s Monex Group, clearing companies, and several large banks.
The Institute of International Finance, representing the financial services industry, has brought together the private participants following a call for participation issued in May.
Project Agora is the BIS’s largest project in terms of participants, with private-sector members working alongside the Bank of France, Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, Bank of Mexico, Swiss National Bank, Bank of England, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Project Agora aims to address “structural inefficiencies” in the existing international payments system by applying the unified ledger concept developed by the BIS.
By focusing on customer verification and Anti-Money Laundering, Project Agora seeks to eliminate the repetitive steps that intermediaries currently handle in transactions.
According to a statement from the BIS:
“The project […] will investigate how tokenised commercial bank deposits can be seamlessly integrated with tokenised wholesale central bank money in a public-private programmable core financial platform.”
Agustin Carstens, leading the BIS, explained in a 2023 presentation that the BIS envisions a unified ledger with features such as open architecture, programmability, and composability.
In other news, The Bank of International Settlements has released a report warning banks against using permissionless blockchains.
Under this design, CBDCs and tokenized deposits will reside in separate sections of the ledger, with smart contracts facilitating their interaction. Multiple unified ledgers will also be able to interact with each other.
Project participants must identify legal and regulatory challenges and gaps within the seven represented jurisdictions, focusing on their impact on tokenization and CBDCs.
By the end of 2025, Project Agora is expected to conclude, and the BIS will release a final report.
