Project Agorá is a major public-private collaboration convened by the BIS, seven central banks, the IIF, and more than 40 financial institutions to address long-standing challenges in wholesale cross-border payments. The project demonstrates a path toward faster, more efficient cross-border wholesale payments and confirms that key technical and legal barriers are surmountable.

The IIF has engaged Kaleido to provide the technology services to design, develop, test, and deploy the Agorá prototype.

Wholesale cross-border payments have historically faced friction from fragmented infrastructure, slow settlement, and jurisdictional complexity. The project needed to demonstrate that multi-currency settlement using both tokenized central bank reserves and tokenized commercial bank deposits is technically achievable on a programmable ledger, and that settlement finality is legally achievable across multiple jurisdictions.

Kaleido is the technology vendor for Project Agorá, contributing to the demonstration of how tokenized central bank reserves and tokenized commercial bank deposits on a programmable ledger can enhance the efficiency of cross-border payments. The prototype was developed iteratively and user-tested with participating institutions, confirming that atomic settlement using tokenized reserves and tokenized deposits is technically attainable.