The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has reached a significant milestone with Project Agorá, successfully completing tokenized wholesale cross-border payments using real funds.

In a July 2026 trial, 28 financial institutions and central banks settled approximately CHF 800,000 (around $1 million) across 17 transaction scenarios utilizing tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits. Payments denominated in six currencies were completed in an average of 80 seconds, illustrating how tokenization could enable faster, safer, and more transparent international settlements.

Source: Cointelegraph's X Post

Global Banks Complete BIS Tokenized Payment Test

The trial encompassed corporate payments, interbank transfers, intragroup transactions, dual-currency settlements, and payment-versus-payment (PvP) transactions conducted in Swiss francs, euros, British pounds, Japanese yen, South Korean won, and U.S. dollars.

Participating institutions included major global banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Citi, UBS, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Standard Chartered, MUFG, BNY, Lloyds Banking Group, Mizuho, NatWest, TD Bank, and CaixaBank, among others. Central bank participants comprised the Bank of England, Bank of France, Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, and the Swiss National Bank. Kaleido provided the blockchain infrastructure, while SIX conducted the testing.

Project Agorá Moves From Prototype to Live Testing

Project Agorá is a collaborative initiative between BIS and the Institute of International Finance (IIF), established to examine how tokenization could improve wholesale cross-border payments. It builds on prior BIS Innovation Hub experiments exploring tokenized settlement, including multi-CBDC platform research, and aligns with the G20's longstanding priority—set in 2020—to enhance cross-border payments by reducing cost, increasing speed, improving transparency, and expanding access.

In May 2026, BIS launched a proof of concept demonstrating how tokenized commercial bank deposits could be integrated with tokenized central bank reserves on a shared platform for atomic multi-currency settlement.

The July trial went beyond simulation, validating the technology through value-bearing transactions. The system also proved compatible with ISO 20022 messaging standards, including pacs.008, pacs.009, and camt.053. ISO 20022 is the global financial messaging standard increasingly adopted by major payment systems worldwide, and this compatibility signals that tokenized platforms could interoperate with the existing financial messaging infrastructure banks already use.

Targeting Faster Cross-Border Payments

Cross-border payments remain dependent on correspondent banking networks, which can be slow, expensive, and operationally complex. Traditional international wholesale payments often take one to several business days to settle and involve multiple intermediary banks, each adding cost and latency. Project Agorá has developed an open-source programmable platform that leverages atomic settlement, ensuring transactions complete in full or not at all. Smart contracts further enable automated compliance checks and conditional payment execution.

The successful trial underscores growing institutional interest in tokenizing financial infrastructure, suggesting that regulated digital currencies could enhance international payment efficiency without compromising the security of the existing banking system.

What Comes Next

BIS emphasized that Project Agorá remains a research initiative rather than a production payment network. Next steps will involve additional live-value testing, broader private sector participation, and thorough assessment of legal and regulatory considerations.

As central banks and financial institutions continue developing tokenized money, Project Agorá serves as a concrete demonstration that blockchain-based payments can deliver faster and more transparent cross-border settlements while preserving the integrity of the current financial system.