A coalition of global financial institutions and central banks has successfully finished real-value testing under Project Agorá, an initiative examining how tokenization can streamline wholesale cross-border payments. The trials, coordinated by the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub, involved processing genuine monetary transfers using digital representations of commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves.
Twenty-eight public and private entities took part, including major commercial banks such as JPMorgan, Citi, and UBS, alongside others like BNY, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, Lloyds Banking Group, Mizuho, MUFG, NatWest, Standard Chartered, and TD Bank.
Five central banks—the Bank of England, Bank of France, Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, and Swiss National Bank—also joined the exercise.
Together, they executed roughly 30 transactions spanning 17 different scenarios, moving a total of approximately CHF 800,000 (around $1 million) across six currencies: the Swiss franc, euro, British pound, Japanese yen, South Korean won, and US dollar.
Individual transaction values ranged from about CHF 9,000 to CHF 125,000 or equivalent amounts in other currencies.
The scenarios tested practical applications, including corporate payments, interbank transfers, internal group fund movements, dual-currency deals, and payment-versus-payment settlements for foreign exchange.
Tokens issued on the platform stood for actual monetary value rather than simulated amounts.
Settlement occurred atomically, ensuring that all related asset transfers either completed together or none proceeded at all.
This approach eliminates settlement risk by synchronizing the exchange of funds.
Even without direct connections to participants’ existing real-time gross settlement systems or core banking platforms, the average time from payment initiation to final settlement measured around 80 seconds.
The prototype interacted with external systems through established ISO 20022 messaging standards for payments and reporting.
Participants highlighted benefits such as enhanced end-to-end visibility into payment status and routing, plus the capacity to handle corporate payments directly on the shared platform.
Roughly 250 staff members from payments, compliance, risk, legal, and technology teams across the organizations contributed to the tests.
The exercise strengthened operational readiness and allowed institutions to evaluate the broader implications of adopting similar technology.
SIX helped coordinate the transactions, while blockchain infrastructure provider Kaleido supported the testing platform.
Project Agorá, a public-private effort also involving the Institute of International Finance, builds on earlier prototype work that demonstrated the technical feasibility of combining tokenized deposits with tokenized central bank money on a shared programmable ledger.
The real-value phase confirmed that such a system can support diverse cross-border use cases under realistic conditions while preserving the safety of settlement in central bank reserves.
Central banks retained control over their respective currencies within the layered architecture.
Although the current prototype is experimental rather than a finished commercial product, the successful trials mark a significant step.
Further testing is planned to assess performance under higher volumes, with additional technical details expected in coming periods.
The results illustrate how tokenization and atomic settlement can reduce delays, improve transparency, and address longstanding frictions in international wholesale payments without requiring fundamental changes to legal characterizations of deposits or reserves. The conclusion of these trials underscores growing institutional interest in modernizing the infrastructure that underpins global finance through carefully controlled digital innovation.