Jessica Renier

Digital assets, programmable money, and AI-driven transactions are crossing borders at increased speed. But the rules governing them are being written jurisdiction by jurisdiction, with no shared architecture in sight. As the US advances GENIUS Act rules for private-sector stablecoins, the EU deepens MiCA and pursues a digital euro, and China scales its state-backed e-CNY, three major economies are building divergent governance frameworks around one underlying technology — with significant implications for cross-border payments, monetary policy transmission, and AI in the global financial system.

This policy divergence is a compliance challenge for market participants, but it is also the early stage of a structural buildup. When domestically rational policy choices generate internationally costly spillovers — and when no coordinating mechanism exists to manage them — fragmentation compounds over time until the cost of inaction becomes prohibitive. Digital currencies and AI governance are following this trajectory, and while the window to get ahead of it remains open, it is closing.

Against this backdrop, the Bretton Woods Committee will convene a closed roundtable at Point Zero Forum on Thursday, June 25th to bring together global policymakers, central bankers, regulators, and private sector leaders to stress-test the diagnosis. This discussion will directly inform the Bretton Woods Committee's upcoming work, with a focus on the defining digital governance challenge of the moment: whether coordination across jurisdictions can accelerate to match the digital rails being built beneath the global financial system.

The roundtable will be a 90-minute discussion featuring 10 minutes of scene-setting remarks from featured speakers, followed by an open exchange among the broader group. A brief framing paper will be circulated in advance. The core question animating the discussion: What are the costs of continued fragmentation — and what global coordination mechanisms are necessary to manage the associated risks and opportunities?

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.