BIS Project Agorá settles $1M in tokenized cross-border tests

In July, the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Agorá completed real-value tests of tokenized wholesale cross-border payments, settling about 800,000 Swiss francs (roughly $1 million) across 17 transaction scenarios. The tests recorded an average settlement time of about 80 seconds and used tokenized central bank reserves and tokenized commercial bank deposits.

Twenty-eight financial institutions and central banks took part in the trials. Central bank participants included the Bank of England, Bank of France, Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea and the Swiss National Bank. Commercial banking participants included JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, UBS, Standard Chartered and MUFG.

Transactions in the tests involved Swiss francs, euros, pounds sterling, Japanese yen, South Korean won and US dollars. Settlements were carried out with digital tokens that represented central bank reserves or commercial bank deposits, enabling transfers across jurisdictions and currencies.

In May, Project Agorá’s prototype demonstrated atomic settlement across multiple currencies and jurisdictions, arranging token transfers so all sides of a transaction settle at the same time to remove settlement risk. The July trials moved that work into live-value transfers to validate technical and operational processes with real money.

Project Agorá was launched by the BIS in 2024 to test whether tokenized reserves and deposits can improve the speed and efficiency of wholesale cross-border payments. The BIS described the July trials as an important milestone and intends to continue testing. Future work will expand transaction scenarios, refine interoperability between token systems and examine operational, legal and regulatory considerations for using tokenized money in international payment flows.