As programmable money matures from stablecoin to full financial infrastructure, the question shifts from whether it works to who it serves and how it's governed. This fireside with Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino explores the role of programmable assets in building a faster, more inclusive, and global financial system.

Project Agorá tests the hypothesis that a multi-currency settlement mechanism that leverages tokenization and programmability could mitigate inefficiencies and frictions in cross-border payments, making them faster, more transparent and safer.

To examine this, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Institute of International Finance (IIF) combined forces to convene seven central banks and over 40 international financial institutions to test the tokenization of commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves on a unifying ledger. The roundtable will bring together Project Agorá public and private sector participants to reflect on the project and lessons learned.

Switzerland is not debating whether programmable money works - it is building it. Various pilots are now looking to answer the same question: how does programmable money move from laboratory to the infrastructure layer of everyday finance? This session examines where deposit tokens, stablecoins, and CBDCs serve genuinely different use cases, and what the rest of the world can learn from the Swiss approach.