Some users are optimistic about Project Agora's execution speed in the currency contest while many others dismiss both it and mBridge as insignificant or flawed with negligible adoption.
@richardturrin I’m quietly pleased about Agora copying the mBridge flawed framework.
After 5 years mBridge did a total of $55 billion in payments in all of 2025. That’s a failure. Zero mass adoption. It isn’t scaling. It’s on permanent pilot because it’s badly designed.
@joequant @DianelosG @richardturrin I warned HKICL back in 2023 when they briefed me on details of mBridge, suggested I could fix it for them. They said as long as HKMA kept funding it they didn’t care if it didn’t work well or scale.
@Kathleen_Tyson_ @DianelosG @richardturrin Off the top of my head. Looking at the pictures 1) where does the money actually move? In SWIFT you have a series of ledger entries for correspondent banks. Absolutely no idea how this works. 2) In an actual system, you want to remove two bottlenecks. Synchronicity and
@DianelosG @richardturrin You’d have to retain me professionally for me to detail all the flaws. Infrastructure design is my core profession. $55 billion a year after 5 years development isn’t even enough to be a rounding error in totality of payments in participating currencies.
@Kathleen_Tyson_ @richardturrin @Kathleen_Tyson_ Why do you think it's badly designed? I read that in comparison to SWIFT it is faster, cheaper, more transparent, and cannot be abused for sanctions. And it seems to be growing exponentially: from 1.8B total in 2024 to some 55B now.
@Kathleen_Tyson_ @DianelosG @richardturrin locking. Basically you don't want to wait for a reply before sending another message, and you don't want to lock the system. Now even in that picture I see places where you are waiting for the system to respond, and places where you lock the database. In any real payments
@Kathleen_Tyson_ @DianelosG @richardturrin they propose doesn't have a settlement cycle so I have no idea how this is going to work. Also I don't see any provision for netting. And they there are the little things. One problem with doing AML-KYC and embedding that in your settlement system is that at that point you
@richardturrin It’s an upgrade to SWIFT in effect but won’t change the geopolitical economics that drives system bifurcation.
@richardturrin Actually no one in the stablecoin world is discussing Project Agora because no one cares about it.
@Kathleen_Tyson_ @DianelosG @richardturrin So basically when you running a simulation of black holes you have a lot of nodes processing information and you want to keep all of those nodes happy. It turns out that this is the sort of thinking that you end up doing when you do a money settlement system. All money
@Kathleen_Tyson_ @DianelosG @richardturrin that will just kill you. The other issue is that its got the worst of both world. Traditional banking works with a rhythm. You send the messages. All the banks get a lot of IOU's during the day, and overnight you add up all of your IOU's and do one big transfer. The system
@Kathleen_Tyson_ @DianelosG @richardturrin have nightmares involving synchronizing information because information is inheritly messy. BTW, people wonder what my day job is and its related to this sort of thing. It's also related to astrophysics.
@Kathleen_Tyson_ @DianelosG @richardturrin is is a bunch of computers talking to each other.
@richardturrin Agora versus mBridge is the institutional layer of the currency contest that tariff headlines miss. The real race is execution speed, can 40-plus banks in Agora ship a wholesale CBDC layer before mBridge scales beyond its pilot. Platform builders win, not platform narrators.