Morten Bech

This roundtable examines the potential of public permissionless blockchains to enhance traditional financial services. However, with new opportunities come new risks. These risks, such as operational, reputational and legal risks need to be adequately addressed. The aim of the roundtable is to discuss potential use cases for regulated activities on public permissionless blockchains, the risks involved and how these risks can be mitigated by policymakers, including international and industry standard setters, and regulators.

Participants can familiarise themselves with the topic with the following pre-read materials from the discussants:

• Enhancing financial services with permissionless blockchains - Publications Office of the EU
• guardian-fixed-income-framework.pdf
• Private sector partners join Project Agorá
• Introducing Digital Asset Securities Control Principles (DASCP) - Euroclear

The mentioned discussions of potential use cases for regulated activities on public permissionless blockchains, the risks involved and how these risks can be mitigated by policymakers, including international and industry standard setters, and regulators will be published in a whitepaper.

This panel convenes a high-level public sector discussion on the developments of next generation payment technology, diving into the subject areas of both domestic and cross-border payments as well as retail and wholesale applications. Senior experts will debate innovative technological solutions to existing pain points in the financial system and the potential to significantly improve existing processes involving central bank and commercial bank money. 

This roundtable gathers experts from key organizations involved in shaping the future of wholesale cross-border payments. In this early phase—focused on collecting diverse requirements, shaping the technological fundamentals and establishing a multi-stakeholder project organisation—participants will share initial lessons learned and discuss anticipated challenges for future phases of Project Agorá. The discussion is designed to foster robust debate and exchange innovative ideas from various perspectives.

It aims to discuss the driving forces and motivation behind project Agorá and synthesise early insights around key coordination, technical, and operational challenges in building a resilient next-generation tokenised cross-border payment platform. Further the roundtable aims to share and ideate on possible strategies to resolve identified challenges and consider emerging technology trends in future phases of the project.

The discussion will produce a report of synthesised insights, current challenges and proposed solutions and strategies, to effectively and efficiently enable the future of cross-border payments with future phases of Project Agorá.