The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said its Project Agila pilot has shown that a distributed ledger-based wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC) platform can support interbank fund transfers beyond normal business hours, giving the central bank an early technical basis for using tokenized money in large-value payments.
In a December 2025 report, the BSP said Project Agila tested whether distributed ledger technology (DLT), tokenization, and programmable transaction rules could be used to modernize the country’s wholesale payment infrastructure, particularly for transfers between financial institutions when the PhilPaSS Plus real-time gross settlement system is unavailable.
At the core of the project was a sandbox built on Oracle’s Hyperledger Fabric platform, which the BSP selected after comparing it with Corda in an earlier system-selection phase.
The two technologies were assessed for access control, security, efficiency, interoperability, and programmability — the key design requirements for a potential wholesale CBDC platform. Oracle’s Hyperledger Fabric was eventually chosen for the proof-of-concept stage.
The BSP said the proof-of-concept demonstrated a full wCBDC lifecycle inside the sandbox, including token creation, issuance, transfer, redemption, and retirement.
In the current setup, financial institutions can request the minting of wholesale CBDC tokens, which are then issued against balances held in their RTGS accounts.
Those tokens can be transferred between participating institutions even outside regular banking hours, although some lifecycle processes such as issuance and redemption still depend on PhilPaSS-linked workflows during business hours.
For the BSP, the main technology takeaway is that a programmable ledger can act as an alternative settlement rail for interbank transfers during nights, weekends, holidays, or system outages.
The report said the platform’s decentralized architecture allows participating financial institutions to transfer funds directly to one another without BSP intervention, as long as transactions comply with predefined endorsement policies and cryptographic validation rules.
The BSP said the system uses Hyperledger Fabric’s distributed ledger architecture together with Oracle’s tokenization engine.
Among the features highlighted in the report were peer-to-peer transfer capability, the Raft consensus protocol for transaction validation, smart contracts for automated fund movement, and an immutable ledger for transaction recording and auditability. These are meant to reduce the need for conventional messaging, clearing, and reconciliation steps in wholesale payments.
Performance was another focus of the tests. According to the BSP, the platform was able to process as many as 105,000 transactions a day, with each transfer completed within 5,000 milliseconds.
That is well above the average 6,789 daily transactions processed by PhilPaSS Plus in the first quarter of 2025, based on the figures cited in the report.
However, the BSP said performance started to show limits when volumes went beyond 200,000 daily transfers, pointing to the need for further cloud scaling and configuration work if the system is to support larger or more demanding use cases.
The central bank also said the platform showed promise in programmability and process automation.
In its current form, the system can support smart contract-based token transfers and other automated workflows.
Once integrated more deeply with PhilPaSS Plus, the BSP said smart contracts could also automate withdrawal transactions from RTGS accounts in exchange for wCBDC issuance, the return of funds to deposit accounts during redemption, and the retirement of redeemed tokens.
Beyond off-hours transfers, the BSP is positioning the underlying technology as a possible base for more advanced financial market use cases.
The report identified tokenized securities settlement and institutional cross-border payments as the next areas for wholesale CBDC exploration, suggesting that Project Agila is less about launching a retail digital peso and more about building programmable infrastructure for high-value financial transactions.
Still, the report made clear that the technology is not production-ready.
Among the issues flagged were the need for faster confirmation of transaction finality, stronger notification systems, more advanced user onboarding and access controls, better API security, stronger multi-factor authentication, and tighter integration with existing financial market infrastructure.
The BSP also said future work will need to focus on interoperability with PhilPaSS Plus and other systems, as well as on cybersecurity, scalability, and disaster recovery.
The BSP said Project Agila gives it its clearest technical test yet of how tokenized central bank money could work in the Philippine wholesale payments environment.
