Written by: Thejaswini M A
Compiled by Chopper, Foresight News
Thousands of years ago, the ancient Greek Agorá was a public marketplace in Athens where anyone could come and trade freely, with no barriers to entry and no restrictions based on geographic jurisdiction—the very origin of the term "permissionless."
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) named the project Agorá, a name with intriguing implications. However, the Agorá project, led by the BIS and implemented by seven central banks alongside more than forty private institutions, is actually designed in direct contrast to the meaning of “free marketplace.”
In this system, funds are labeled with their country of origin before transfer; smart contracts automatically perform AML screening and sanctions list verification at the token level; each country’s central bank retains full control over its own reserves, and cross-border fund transfers must pass through the compliance verification layer embedded within the tokens.
In short, it is a programmable fiat currency system where everything requires prior approval.
The seven central banks participating in the Agorá project are the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico, the Swiss National Bank, and the Banque de France representing the eurozone; the Bank of Canada joined four days ago. Financial giants such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Mastercard, Visa, and SWIFT, along with over forty other institutions, are jointly involved in the development.
Given that this project has brought together such a massive institutional force, I decided to thoroughly break down this system.
The project architecture employs a two-layer separation design: one layer, fully controlled by central banks, manages the underlying base currency reserves; the other layer is operated by commercial banks to handle everyday transactions for end users. Tokenized commercial bank deposits are aggregated into a shared platform, where multiple private institutions collaboratively process multi-currency settlements; meanwhile, central bank reserves are held separately in national-specific ledgers, ensuring that sovereignty remains firmly in the hands of each respective central bank.
BIS aims to establish a state-controlled closed-loop payment system by integrating commercial bank ledgers and anchoring them to national sovereign reserves. Institutions are accelerating the implementation of compliance frameworks to complete their deployment before decentralized stablecoins like Tether fully sever global commerce from the traditional banking system.
Current cross-border payments are like a relay race: message transmission, manual compliance verification, and ledger settlement each occur across separate institutional systems, often taking days. The Agorá project compresses this lengthy, multi-step process into a single, instant on-chain operation. The prototype was successfully deployed on May 27, 2026, following which the Bank of Canada immediately announced its participation.
The organizers emphasized that the current phase remains focused on infrastructure testing, with no official timeline for commercial deployment; however, the next phase will enter pilot testing with real funds.
Unlike central banks in the past, which only released research reports, the seven major monetary authorities spent two years developing and testing this real-time cross-border settlement system, with the underlying code already operational. The current challenges are no longer technical but rather how multiple governments can implement regulation and define responsibilities for the shared network—administrative coordination faces significant obstacles.
The established cross-border messaging giant SWIFT is simultaneously advancing its underlying infrastructure upgrades, positioning itself at the commercial banking level. On March 30, 2026, SWIFT finalized the design of its blockchain-based shared ledger and entered the minimum viable product (MVP) development phase, with plans to launch real-time transactions this year. The ledger is built on Hyperledger Besu, which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), while final fund settlements will still be completed off-chain using traditional real-time gross settlement systems.
However, SWIFT and Agorá are not competitors: SWIFT’s ledger focuses on reconciling tokenized deposits between commercial banks, while Agorá handles the final large-value settlement of central bank reserves across countries. The BIS designed the two systems from the outset to be interoperable, and the traditional cross-border settlement system is being gradually transformed into a programmable digital network in two stages.
A close look at the participant list reveals significant overlap: Deutsche Bank is both a core member of Agorá and, alongside Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Barclays, Santander, and seven other banks, has formed a consortium to explore issuing 1:1 reserve-backed tokens on public blockchains; UBS and Citigroup are also involved on both sides; JPMorgan is participating in Agorá while operating its own JPM Coin, and recently deployed a cross-border settlement pilot on the Ripple ledger.
Such dual-track investment is highly unusual in finance: institutions typically concentrate their technical resources on a single technology pathway. The fact that leading teams are simultaneously developing two competing solutions reflects internal divisions within bank management. Giants armed with vast amounts of data and substantial capital cannot predict which framework will ultimately prevail. While the technical path is clear, regulatory directions remain uncertain.
Ripple has spent a decade advocating that "atomic settlement"—where a transaction either fully executes or is entirely canceled—is the optimal solution for cross-border payments. Now, the Agorá project implemented by the BIS has realized this settlement logic, replacing XRP with central bank reserve tokens as the settlement medium, directly undermining the necessity of XRP as a cross-border bridge asset.
However, the XRP Ledger continues to penetrate traditional finance. On May 6, JPMorgan’s Kinexys, Mastercard, Ripple, and Ondo Finance completed the first cross-border redemption of a tokenized U.S. Treasury on the XRP Ledger, with full settlement taking less than five seconds. The Ripple USD stablecoin, RLUSD, surpassed $1.4 billion in market capitalization; in January 2026, the total value of tokenized assets on the XRP Ledger exceeded $2 billion; Société Générale issued a euro stablecoin on the XRP Ledger in February; and in December 2025, Ripple received a limited-purpose trust bank charter from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).
Ripple's architectural logic has been validated, but the claim that "XRP is indispensable" has not been realized. Nevertheless, Ripple's ongoing integration into institutional clearing systems holds far greater significance for long-term value than the endless debate over whether Ripple or central bank reserve tokens are superior.
Setting aside marketing hype, on Ripple, transaction fees are extremely low and permanently waived, with no proceeds flowing to node operators. Increased institutional trading volume does not generate revenue for validation nodes or token holders, as is the case with Ethereum gas fees; it only slightly burns existing XRP. When institutions like JPMorgan transfer tokenized assets on-chain, they use their own capital pools and do not rely on circulating XRP for liquidity—the network merely provides high-speed transfers and cryptographic security.
The core value of this model lies in ecosystem integration. Once financial institutions trust this network to custody fiat and stablecoin assets, the technology will become embedded in global financial infrastructure, compelling the deployment of bank-grade node facilities and making the ledger a permanent component of the global financial system. In the long term, deeply integrating this technology with global banking is far more significant than the price fluctuations of any single token.
All of the above variables ultimately converge on the stablecoin sector. Tether’s daily trading volume consistently ranges between $40 billion and $50 billion, with the total market capitalization of all stablecoins reaching $320 billion. While Agorá is still in its pilot phase with no clear timeline for deployment, SpaceX has already been using stablecoins to manage cross-border corporate funds, and Western Union has launched remittance services on the Solana blockchain—the market competition has already moved ahead.
Agorá focuses on large institutional wholesale cross-border settlement; if successfully implemented, it will divert corporate cross-border fund demands previously handled by stablecoins. However, this market segment represents only one small aspect of stablecoin applications: Brazil’s Central Bank issued Regulation No. 561, prohibiting domestic financial institutions from using stablecoins for cross-border payments, yet it cannot prevent Brazilian citizens from holding USD-stablecoins to preserve value; Turkish retail investors buy USDT to hedge against lira inflation—these fragmented demands fall entirely outside Agorá’s service scope.
In the short term, stablecoins complement Agorá more than they compete with it, as their use cases barely overlap: Agorá is a closed institutional network accessible only to central banks or banks licensed by central banks; ordinary individuals hoarding USD for risk mitigation and small payment companies using public blockchains for cross-border remittances cannot access this system. The official closed-loop system cannot match the inclusive access speed of public blockchains, nor can public blockchain stablecoins achieve the final settlement efficacy required by central banks.
The medium-term landscape is more complex. Currently, corporate finance teams use USDC and USDT for cross-border settlements due to the lengthy cycles and high fees of traditional correspondent banking. If Agorá is successfully implemented in the future and achieves sufficient liquidity, some corporate funds may shift. Assuming comparable clearing efficiency, corporate CFOs will prioritize official channels that are subject to sovereign regulation and free from third-party credit risk.
However, establishing unified governance rules among the seven major central banks is itself a global challenge, and many cross-border projects have failed precisely because of this. Meanwhile, major corporations have already integrated the USDC system and built mature risk management processes; they are unlikely to abandon their existing operations solely for a theoretically superior new system.
The market will likely become stratified: Agorá will dominate large-scale institutional cross-border channels, while public chain stablecoins will hold onto retail and fragmented transactions. Though it appears to be an even split of the market, sovereign systems have effectively locked the boundaries of public chains, confining decentralized networks to areas that cannot undermine the foundations of traditional intermediaries—remittances, personal savings, and small-value payments in emerging markets. These markets are substantial in size, yet they are not the core hubs of global financial leverage.
This market segmentation theory is about to be put to the test: the EU’s Pontes framework will connect various distributed ledgers with Europe’s core clearing system, TARGET, by September 2026—just three months away. Once successfully integrated, European institutional tokenized payments will gain direct access to central banks, marking the official beginning of direct competition between official systems and open blockchains.
The ancient Agora of Athens declined because people stopped coming to trade—that is the ultimate measure of any financial network.