BIS Project Agorá settles $1 million in tokenized cross-border payment trials
Project Agorá, a BIS initiative launched in 2024, completed real-value testing of tokenized wholesale cross-border payments. In the trials, 28 financial institutions and central banks settled about 800,000 Swiss francs, or roughly $1 million, across 17 transaction scenarios. The tests used tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits to settle payments in Swiss francs, euros, pounds sterling, Japanese yen, South Korean won and US dollars, with average settlement times of about 80 seconds. Participants included central banks such as the Bank of England, Bank of France, Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea and the Swiss National Bank, plus major banks including JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, UBS, Standard Chartered and MUFG. The BIS said the results mark an important milestone and that further testing will continue.
