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Twenty-eight global banks including JP Morgan, Citi, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and Standard Chartered completed real cross-border payments using tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits in a $1 million live test organized by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the most concrete production trial of blockchain-based wholesale settlement to date.
Project Agorá — the BIS initiative exploring how tokenization can modernize the plumbing of international finance — processed approximately $1 million (CHF 800,000) across 30 transactions in roughly 80 seconds, according to a BIS report published Wednesday. The pilot operated across six currencies: US dollar, euro, British pound, Japanese yen, Swiss franc, and South Korean won.
The mechanism differs from stablecoins like Circle's USDC or Tether. Project Agorá tokenizes two forms of traditional bank money: central bank reserves held by commercial banks at the central bank, and commercial bank deposits. By placing both on a shared ledger, banks were able to settle transactions and foreign exchange flows simultaneously – a critical improvement over the current correspondent banking system, where each institution maintains its own records and funds pass through multiple intermediaries before final settlement.
The platform also enabled atomic FX – exchanging two currencies at the same time rather than waiting for one side of a transaction to settle before completing the other. That eliminates a specific settlement risk where one party sends funds without receiving the expected currency in return.
The test ran alongside existing payment infrastructure without replacing it, and payments were fully traceable from origin to destination – a feature banks cited as a significant operational improvement.
The project reflects a broader shift as tokenized assets move from proof-of-concept to live testing at major institutions. Asset managers have begun issuing tokenized money market and private credit funds, while stablecoins are increasingly used in corporate treasury operations. The BIS project sits at the intersection of central bank infrastructure and private sector deployment — potentially creating a new settlement layer that any regulated institution can access.
A separate Bank of Korea test ran tokenized reserves across six currencies in parallel with the BIS pilot.
