The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has successfully concluded a real-value pilot under Project Agorá, showcasing the potential of tokenized commercial bank deposits to facilitate near-instant cross-border settlements. The initiative aims to significantly mitigate settlement risk—the danger of one party fulfilling a payment obligation without receiving the corresponding funds in return. The project advances a goal the G20 identified as a priority in 2020: improving the speed, cost, transparency, and accessibility of cross-border payments, which today typically require one to two business days to settle through correspondent banking networks.

The live testing phase involved 28 financial institutions and central banks, which executed a total of 30 transactions across six different currencies. The combined value of the transfers reached CHF 800,000 (approximately $993,000), with individual transaction amounts ranging from CHF 9,000 to CHF 125,000. The average settlement time for these transactions was approximately 80 seconds—a fraction of the hours or days that conventional multi-currency transfers can require when moving across time zones and intermediary banks.

The experiment evaluated 17 distinct transaction scenarios. These included corporate and interbank payments, single-currency transfers, dual-currency transactions, payment-versus-payment (PvP) exchanges, and intragroup banking transfers.

Atomic Settlement Technology

Project Agorá utilizes atomic settlement to exchange tokenized representations of real bank money across multiple currencies simultaneously. This mechanism forces both legs of a transaction to be linked into a single process: either the currencies are exchanged concurrently, or the transaction does not proceed. By doing so, it removes the intermediate stage where only one party has delivered their payment.

This approach addresses a critical vulnerability in traditional cross-border payments, where an institution might transfer one currency before receiving another. Such delays—often spanning different time zones, business hours, and multiple intermediary banks—can expose transacting parties to the possibility that a counterparty could fail before completing its obligation. By eliminating this settlement gap, Project Agorá ensures neither party is left waiting for their corresponding funds.

Prototype Integration Challenges

Despite the prototype's impressive 80-second average settlement time, the BIS emphasized that the pilot operated on a standalone tokenized platform completely disconnected from the live real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems and core banking infrastructure of participating institutions. The BIS identified the integration of live RTGS and core banking systems as the primary technical, legal, and governance hurdle before the platform could be deployed at an institutional scale.

During the test, funds were not represented by unbacked demonstration tokens but were instead backed by real money. These funds were linked to dedicated RTGS escrow arrangements outside the test environment, while the actual settlement occurred on the shared ledger. Following completion, the tokenized balances could be redeemed through the underlying banking infrastructure.

The BIS has not set a production timetable. The upcoming testing phase, scheduled to run through the fourth quarter of 2026, will assess transaction capacity and system resilience during periods of higher activity. The publication of formal technical specifications is targeted for the first quarter of 2027.

Participating Institutions

Direct participants in the live testing included the Bank of England, the Bank of France (representing the Eurosystem), the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, and the Swiss National Bank. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of Mexico contributed to the broader initiative but did not conduct transactions during this specific phase.

Major private-sector institutions also participated, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, and Lloyds Banking Group. In total, approximately 250 public- and private-sector employees were involved across operational, compliance, legal, and risk-management capacities.

Distinguishing Tokenized Bank Money from Stablecoins

A key characteristic of Project Agorá is its use of tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits. Because these tokens represent existing, regulated money operating within established regulatory and banking frameworks, they do not create a new financial instrument.

This architecture explicitly differs from privately issued stablecoins. While stablecoins are generally backed by reserve assets, they exist outside traditional bank deposit insurance and bank capital frameworks. This distinction is highly significant for institutional transactions that require central bank oversight, established compliance controls, and legally recognized settlement finality.

Furthermore, the project maintained all sanctions screening and anti-money-laundering (AML) procedures within existing banking systems. This design ensures that regulatory safeguards remain intact while allowing tokenized infrastructure to support faster settlement. Additionally, by utilizing established ISO 20022 financial messaging standards, Project Agorá could allow banks to connect tokenized payment systems without needing to replace their existing payment messaging infrastructure.

While the pilot indicates that atomic settlement technology can function with real monetary value and multiple currencies, transitioning from a controlled pilot to a production system will require extensive integration with live banking networks. Large-scale deployment will depend on regulatory coordination across jurisdictions, governance agreements among central banks and financial institutions, and building the institutional infrastructure necessary to connect tokenized systems with the global banking network. The results also feed into a broader wave of institutional tokenization efforts underway at the BIS Innovation Hub and individual central banks, including separate projects exploring wholesale central bank digital currencies and interlinked CBDC corridors.