The Bank for International Settlements has released results from Project Agora, a prototype demonstrating that tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits can settle wholesale cross-border payments in seconds across multiple currencies and jurisdictions — a process that currently takes days under the correspondent banking system. Published on 27 May 2026, the findings stem from a public-private collaboration involving the BIS, the Institute of International Finance, seven central banks, and over 40 regulated financial institutions. Project participants have agreed to move from simulation to real-value testing.
Atomic Settlement Across Seven Jurisdictions
Project Agorá, meaning "marketplace" in Greek, brought tokenized commercial bank deposits and tokenized central bank reserves onto a single programmable platform so both forms of money could operate together. The prototype delivered atomic, multi-currency settlement — a cross-border transaction chain either completes fully or not at all. The BIS confirmed the approach is achievable securely and with finality across all seven jurisdictions on an around-the-clock basis if implemented.
Smart contracts sit at the design's core, letting institutions embed workflow logic, compliance requirements, and conditional payment triggers directly into transactions, collapsing steps that currently happen separately into one operation. The same consolidation is driving private experiments: Ripple and Mastercard tested a regulated U.S. stablecoin on a public blockchain for near-instant settlement between merchants and card issuers, as reported by FinanceFeeds.
Central Banks Involved and Architecture
Participating central banks were the Bank of England, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Bank of France (representing the Eurosystem), Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, Bank of Mexico, and Swiss National Bank. A layered architecture allowed each central bank to keep autonomy over its national currency inside an interoperable shared platform. The BIS found tokenization does not change the legal characterisation of reserves or deposits, with settlement finality holding across all seven jurisdictions.
Moving to Real-Value Tests as Bank of Canada Joins
Project Agora will now move beyond simulation to real-value transactions involving selected currencies and participants. The Bank of Canada formally joined the initiative, with further private sector participation anticipated. The BIS said the modular design leaves room to add conditional and always-on wholesale payments and to support anti-money laundering, countering the financing of terrorism, sanctions compliance, and fraud detection as regulatory and data-sharing frameworks evolve. Private networks are chasing similar capabilities — Visa recently launched a stablecoin strategy advisory practice.
"The prototype also enhances transparency. All parties to a transaction have access to real-time payment status, while maintaining privacy from non-participating entities," the BIS said. This addresses a long-standing pain point in correspondent banking where senders, receivers, and intermediaries often operate without a shared view of where a payment sits — the same gap commercial pilots like Visa's USDC payout on Visa Direct are trying to close on the retail side.