The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has advanced its Project Agora to the design phase, enlisting 41 private financial firms, including Visa, Mastercard, and SWIFT. Launched in April 2023 alongside seven central banks, the project aims to integrate tokenized commercial bank deposits with tokenized wholesale CBDCs on a unified platform. Agora seeks to address inefficiencies in the global payments system by leveraging the unified ledger concept, which allows seamless interaction between tokenized assets. The project will run until 2025, focusing on legal, regulatory, and technological challenges. Source: Cointelegraph