The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has completed a pilot under Project Agorá that used tokenized money for cross-border payments, processing about $1 million in real-money transactions with settlement taking roughly 80 seconds on average, according to the BIS report.
The test involved five central banks and 28 major global commercial banks. Participants included JPMorgan Chase, Citi, UBS, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered. The pilot examined whether tokenized money could be used for cross-border payments, interbank settlement and foreign-exchange transactions.
Six currencies were included in the pilot
BIS said the test covered six major currencies: the U.S. dollar (USD), euro (EUR), pound sterling (GBP), Japanese yen (JPY), Swiss franc (CHF) and South Korean won (KRW).
The settlement assets used in the pilot were tokenized central bank reserves and tokenized commercial bank deposits. The scenarios tested included corporate payments, interbank fund transfers and foreign-exchange (FX) transactions across borders.
The project tokenizes existing bank money
BIS drew a distinction between Project Agorá and stablecoins already in the market. Mainstream stablecoins today are commonly issued by private-sector firms such as Circle and Tether. Project Agorá, by contrast, tokenizes two forms of money already used in the traditional banking system.
- Central bank reserves: funds used by commercial banks for final settlement with one another.
- Commercial bank deposits: deposits held by companies and retail customers in bank accounts.
In that sense, the project does not create a new payment currency. It places existing bank money onto blockchain-based infrastructure in an effort to improve cross-border payment efficiency.
A shared ledger replaces multi-layer correspondent flows
Cross-border payments today often pass through multiple correspondent banks, with each institution maintaining its own records before settlement is completed. That structure can make the process slow and costly.
Project Agorá uses a shared ledger model that records tokenized money on a common distributed ledger. BIS said that gives participating banks a synchronized view of asset ownership and payment status, which simplifies the payment process.
The BIS report added that the prototype platform was not directly integrated with the banks’ existing payment systems. Even so, the transactions in the pilot still settled in about 80 seconds on average, pointing to the efficiency gains the architecture may offer.
FX settlement was tested on a near-simultaneous basis
The pilot also tested a different approach to FX settlement. In a traditional cross-border FX transaction, one side may have to wait for the other currency leg to settle first, creating settlement risk if one party pays and the other does not perform.
Under Project Agorá, banks were able to exchange two currencies on a near-simultaneous basis, which the report said reduces counterparty risk.
Participating banks also said the new platform gave them greater transparency and traceability from payment initiation to completion. They said it could run alongside existing payment systems rather than fully replace them, allowing financial institutions to introduce tokenized infrastructure step by step.
Tokenization is moving deeper into financial infrastructure
Project Agorá reflects a broader push to move tokenization from proof-of-concept work toward live financial infrastructure testing. In recent years, stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWA) have expanded quickly. Some asset managers have launched tokenized money market funds and tokenized private credit funds, while stablecoins have also started to be used in cross-border payments and corporate treasury management.
Against that backdrop, Project Agorá is exploring whether tokenization can be used to upgrade the banking system’s current cross-border payment infrastructure. BIS described it as one of a number of wholesale tokenization initiatives now being explored globally by central banks and major commercial banks.