BSP Project Agila Tests Wholesale CBDC for Securities Settlement
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) says its “Project Agila” research points to wholesale CBDC (wCBDC) use cases for financial securities settlement and large-value cross-border payments. BSP Governor Eli M. Remolona, Jr. said wholesale CBDC could improve payment efficiency and support new financial services.
In the proposed wholesale CBDC design, each commercial bank would keep an account with the BSP, similar to RTGS. The key upgrade is distributed ledger technology (DLT), aimed at more automation, faster processing, and lower transaction costs. BSP also expects wholesale CBDC for securities trades to reduce settlement risk by shrinking the time gap between trade execution and final settlement.
Project Agila was run in two phases using Oracle’s Hyperledger Fabric platform. Six local institutions participated: BDO Unibank, China Banking Corporation, Land Bank of the Philippines, Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation, Union Bank of the Philippines, and Maya Philippines.
Performance results: the tested cloud setup processed 105,000 transactions within the test window, averaging 1,490.51 ms per transaction, with an error rate of 0.03%. However, scalability stress tests showed throughput constraints when volumes exceeded 200,000 transactions per day, indicating the cloud configuration still needs work.
Security and technical findings: the BSP identified a high-severity input-sanitization flaw that could expose the system to SQL injection and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). Institutions also reported operational issues, including potential balance visibility across banks (China Banking Corporation) and the ability for administrators to view individual user transactions (BDO Unibank). BSP says lessons from Project Agila will inform its official CBDC roadmap.
Neutral
Neutral. This is a central-bank infrastructure pilot, not a crypto market token launch. Even though wholesale CBDC can improve settlement speed and reduce settlement risk, the immediate tradable impact on major crypto assets is limited.
In the short term, headlines about wholesale CBDC and DLT security gaps (SQL injection/XSS, data visibility issues, throughput limits) may temper enthusiasm because it signals implementation risk and a longer timeline. Similar to past regulatory/implementation-focused pilots in traditional finance, the market often reacts more to final deployments and clear policy timelines than to sandbox results.
In the long term, if BSP’s eventual roadmap addresses scalability and security, it could strengthen confidence in institutional blockchain rails for payments and settlement. That can be a mild positive for the broader on-chain infrastructure narrative, but it is unlikely to directly drive demand for specific cryptocurrencies without a direct linkage to crypto liquidity, issuance, or interoperability.