Top commercial banks join G7-led central bank digital currency trial By Reuters

By Marc Jones

LONDON (Reuters) – Forty of the world’s largest commercial banks have joined a G7-led pilot project with the New York Fed and leading central banks from Europe, Korea and Japan on a new digital currency platform that aims to speed up and improve cross-border payments.

The Agora project involves a total of seven central banks. The aim is to investigate whether so-called ‘tokenised’ bank deposits can be used in a faster and more advanced system in combination with tokenised central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

The focus is on the so-called ‘wholesale’ CBDCs, which are only used between banks and not by the public. It attempts to solve the challenges associated with different time zones, legal requirements, and regulatory and technical systems.

The list of participating commercial banks includes many of the world’s largest lenders, such as JPMorgan, HSBC, UBS and Japan’s MUFG.

It also widens the gap in CBDC development, between the G7-led Agora project and another project called mBridge, launched in 2021 by the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, which was recently joined by Saudi Arabia.