BIS Project Agorá Settles Tokenized Cross-Border Payments in Seconds

Launched in April 2024, Project Agorá is a public-private effort convened by the Bank for International Settlements and the Institute of International Finance, initially bringing together seven central banks and more than 40 regulated financial institutions. It tests a programmable platform linking tokenized central bank reserves with commercial bank deposits. The project matters because correspondent banking remains slow, costly and opaque, while atomic settlement can reduce credit and settlement risk by completing every leg of a transaction simultaneously or not at all.

After publishing its prototype findings on May 27, 2026, Project Agorá moved to real-value trials. Results released on July 31 showed that 28 financial institutions and central banks settled $1 million in tokenized cross-border payments across six currencies, with transactions averaging about 80 seconds. The tests demonstrated that multi-currency wholesale payments can achieve final settlement within seconds once funds are locked, while preserving the two-tier banking model and reducing the operational burden of sequential correspondent-bank processing.