BIS Project Agorá Settles $1 Million in Cross-Border Payments via Tokenised Money
Key points
- Project Agorá, led by the BIS with five central banks and 28 commercial banks, settled approximately $1 million (CHF 800,000) in real cross-border transactions across six currencies.
- The 30 transactions settled in an average of roughly 80 seconds on a shared ledger, without direct integration into the participating banks' existing payment infrastructure.
- The pilot tokenised central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits, distinguishing it from private-sector stablecoin approaches used by issuers such as Circle and Tether.
- Simultaneous foreign-exchange settlement was tested, eliminating the sequential settlement risk where one party remits funds before receiving the counterpart currency.
- Named participants include JPMorgan, Citi, UBS, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered, signalling that systemically important institutions are actively stress-testing this infrastructure layer.
Twenty-eight commercial banks, including JPMorgan, Citi, UBS, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered, have completed a live cross-border payment test under Project Agorá, a pilot coordinated by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) alongside five central banks. The exercise processed roughly $1 million (CHF 800,000) across 30 transactions spanning six currencies: the US dollar, euro, British pound, Japanese yen, Swiss franc and South Korean won. Settlements averaged approximately 80 seconds on a shared ledger, even though the prototype was not directly integrated with participants' existing payment infrastructure.
The pilot tokenised two distinct forms of traditional bank money, central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits, rather than relying on private-sector stablecoins. Placing both on a single shared ledger allowed participants to complete foreign-exchange settlements simultaneously rather than sequentially, removing the period during which one party has sent funds but not yet received the other currency. The BIS noted improved payment traceability and compatibility with existing systems rather than displacement of them.
For operators, the significance lies in what the architecture implies for correspondent banking. Multi-hop settlement chains, each with their own records and settlement lags, are the current norm for cross-border payments; a shared ledger compresses that into a single ownership record visible to all parties. The pilot does not retire those systems yet, but it establishes a working proof of concept at real value, with named systemically important institutions on both the commercial and central bank sides. Wholesale tokenisation initiatives of this kind are becoming a meaningful part of the policy and infrastructure conversation, and Project Agorá is among the more substantive ones now in evidence.