BIS begins real-value testing of Project Agorá payments

A major international initiative to modernize cross-border payments using digital token technology is advancing to a critical testing phase with real-value transactions. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), alongside seven central banks and more than 40 private financial institutions, announced this week that Project Agorá will begin trials moving beyond simulations.

The project, which launched in April 2024, has developed a prototype that integrates tokenized commercial bank deposits with tokenized central bank reserves on a unified ledger. This design aims to address longstanding inefficiencies in wholesale cross-border payments, which currently rely on a network of correspondent banks and can take days to settle, incurring significant costs and operational risks.

The prototype demonstrates the feasibility of atomic, multi-currency settlement, where all legs of a transaction are completed simultaneously on an "all-or-nothing" basis. This reduces the risk of one party fulfilling its obligation while the other fails. By leveraging programmable smart contracts, the platform can embed compliance checks and conditional payment triggers directly into transactions,...