The project, called Agorá (Greek for "marketplace"), will be worked on by the central banks—Bank of France (representing the Eurosystem), Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, Bank of Mexico, Swiss National Bank, Bank of England, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York—in collaboration with a sizable group of private financial firms that have been gathered by the Institute of International Finance (IIF).

The project will explore how tokenized commercial bank deposits and tokenized wholesale central bank money can be combined in a public-private programmable core financial platform, building on the unified ledger concept that the BIS proposed.

Through the use of smart contracts, the project will open up new settlement options and transaction kinds that are currently impractical.

The BIS states that the project's goal is to address several structural inefficiencies in the way payments are made nowadays, particularly when they are made across borders, while also overcoming various legal, regulatory, and technical requirements, as well as operation hours and time zones.

The project will also address the growing difficulty of enforcing financial integrity measures against money laundering and customer verification—tasks that, depending on the number of intermediaries involved, are frequently repeated multiple times for a single transaction.

In the event that the project is successful, central banks will be connected for cross-border payments with no settlement risk, perhaps replacing the banking cooperative Swift.

According to Cecilia Skingsley, the head of the BIS Innovation Hub, "we believe that tokenization is the next frontier in terms of the digitalization of money and payment," making Agorá the most ambitious initiative that central banks have yet to embark on.

To engage in the project, the BIS plans to send out a request for expressions of interest to private sector financial institutions that represent each of the seven currencies.