Central banks are quietly building a new digital blueprint for wholesale cross-border money called Project Agorá. Convened by the Bank for International Settlements (
@BIS_org) and
@IIF - alongside 8 central banks, 35 global banks and a few payment and clearing firms - this effort has put forward a framework to upgrade the plumbing behind slow, expensive international bank transfers.
While the project demonstrates that banks can use tokenization to automate their internal workflows, the framework suffers from a foundational structural limitation: it treats wholesale banking in total isolation, leaves non-bank payment innovators out of the core design, and underplays the massive operational impact of stablecoin payments. 1/3