Project Agora: How Central Bank and Commercial Bank Digital Money Can Interoperate

Project Agora just demonstrated digital money interoperability by completing real value transactions using tokenized commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves on shared infrastructure.

Twenty-eight private-sector institutions and central banks transferred approximately CHF800,000 across 17 scenarios, including corporate payments, interbank transfers, dual-currency payments, payment-versus-payment and intragroup bank movements.

Project Agora: digital money interoperability

Institutional digital money will continue to exist in different forms, including various forms of tokenized commercial bank deposits, such as JPMorgan's Kinexys, Cari Network's tokenized deposit and LSEG's DiSH, and central bank money.

Project Agora demonstrates that these forms do not need to converge into a single instrument. They can coexist if an interoperability layer provides common messaging, end-to-end visibility and atomic settlement.

Agora's architecture

Agorá connected existing money systems to a shared tokenized coordination layer. The tokens were digital representations of real regulated monetary claims, with each claim remaining anchored to its issuing commercial bank or central bank.

How the layers worked

Existing systems remained the monetary anchor. Central banks continued to operate RTGS systems and commercial banks continued to record deposits in their core-banking systems.

Institution interfaces allowed central banks to issue and redeem tokenized reserves, while commercial banks could issue and redeem tokenized deposits, hold reserves, submit payments and monitor activity.

Jurisdictional ledgers supported central-bank reserves under the control of the relevant jurisdiction. The unifying ledger coordinated tokenized bank deposits and payments across participants.

Agorá was therefore an orchestration and settlement layer around existing infrastructure - not a wholesale replacement for it.

Payment Example: How a UK-to-Switzerland payment worked

Consider a UK company paying a Swiss company. The UK company instructs its bank to make the payment. Its bank makes tokenized sterling available, while the institution providing the other side makes tokenized Swiss francs available.

The risk-reducing moment

Before settlement, the platform locks both currency amounts. It then executes the sterling and Swiss-franc legs together. If either side is unavailable, the transaction does not proceed.

Atomic settlement is therefore more than a speed improvement. It changes the risk profile by making two interdependent transfers a single coordinated event.

Operating Model Upgrade: From sequential processing to shared coordination

Today's cross-border payment can pass through several correspondent banks. Each institution updates its own ledger, sends messages to the next institution and performs separate reconciliation. Agorá tested a different model.

Interoperability without a rip-and-replace programme

Agorá interacted with central-bank RTGS systems, commercial-bank core systems and established ISO 20022 payment and reporting messages from SWIFT, including pacs.008, pacs.009 and camt.053.

This is important because ISO 20022 is already the common messaging language of modern banking. Banks, payment providers and financial-market infrastructures use it to exchange standardized information about who is paying, who is receiving, the institutions involved, the amount being transferred and the status of the transaction.

The messages tested by Agorá are therefore familiar:

• pacs.008 is used for customer credit transfers between financial institutions.

• pacs.009 is used for transfers between financial institutions.

• camt.053 provides account-statement and transaction-reporting information.

Agorá did not require participating banks to invent an entirely new language for tokenized payments. Banks could prepare and submit payment instructions using message formats their payment systems, operations teams and technology providers already understand.

The important change occurred after the message was submitted. In conventional banking, an ISO 20022 instruction initiates a series of movements across separate bank and central-bank ledgers. Under the Agorá model, the same familiar type of instruction could trigger the locking and atomic settlement of tokenized commercial-bank deposits and central-bank reserves on a shared platform.

This separates two dimensions of adoption:

• Messaging remains familiar: banks can continue using established ISO 20022 standards and payment information.

• Settlement becomes tokenized: the underlying transfer can be coordinated and completed atomically on shared infrastructure.

That materially lowers the barrier to adoption. Banks would not need to replace their core-banking systems, abandon their RTGS connections or retrain their organisations around an entirely unfamiliar messaging framework. Tokenized settlement could instead be introduced as an additional coordination layer around the infrastructure, standards and operational processes they already use.

Strategic Significance

The future of institutional digital money requires interoperability across different forms of regulated money. Agorá is one such layer: central-bank reserves and commercial-bank deposits can retain their respective issuers, legal claims and institutional roles while being coordinated through a shared programmable settlement environment.

Agorá changes how money settles without requiring banks to change how they communicate payment instructions.

Disclaimer: This material is provided for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment, legal, tax or financial advice. While reasonable care has been taken, Tokenization Insight makes no representation regarding its accuracy or completeness. Views and information may change without notice.