Key facts:
The Agora project is promoted by the central banks of 7 countries, including Mexico.
Addressing cross-border issues is the main objective of the project.
40 of the world’s largest and most important financial institutions have agreed to join the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in launching a new payments system based on blockchain technology.
As announced by the BIS on its official website, this is the Agora Project, a plan that explores mechanisms that allow to resolve the problems currently facing cross-border payments.
The list of companies that join this project includes to some financial giants such as JPMorgan, Banco Santander, BBVA, BNB Paribas, Deutsche Bank, Mastercard, Visa, HSBC and CaixaBank.
“The Agorá Project (which means market in Greek) is structured as a public-private partnership,” explains the BIS. It clarifies that it was initially formed with the Participation of seven central banks: the Bank of France (representing the Eurosystem), the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico, the Swiss National Bank, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
These seven central banks will work in partnership with the 40 selected financial companies, acting in coordination with the Institute of International Finance.
The objective is to create an international platform through which Tokenized assets can be bought and sold and exchange central bank-backed digital currencies (CBDCs). This is the path that, according to the organization, will help improve the global payment system by incorporating the advantages of digitalization and tokenization of money.
To date, Agora is the largest and most complex project of all those seeking to improve the global financial system in terms of geographic reach and number of participants. It has the potential to lay the groundwork for a new regulated financial market infrastructure that facilitates cross-border payments.
BIS Report.
A way to compete with bitcoin
Although it does not mention it directly, the BIS, known as “the bank of central banks”, plans to use the Agora project as a way to compete with bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies.
This is what he hinted at in a document presented a year ago outlining ideas for a new payment system. There questioned the role that cryptocurrencies are playingindicating that they “lack the anchor of trust in money provided by the central bank.”
«Cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance (DeFi) have offered a glimpse of the promise of tokenization, but cryptocurrencies are a flawed system that cannot assume the mantle of the future of money“, concludes the BIS.
A stance against the bitcoin ecosystem that the BIS has held for several years, and which it maintains despite the recognition that the digital currency has achieved.
As reported by CriptoNoticias, although the international organization accepts that private banks have up to 2% of their reserves in BTC, it insists on mentioning the “financial risks” that, in its opinion, cryptocurrency represents for the future of the money managed by central banks.
This is why, given the rise in adoption, there is an increasing focus on creating new payment systems. that they are controlled by governments and their banks central.
