Project Agorá, the wholesale cross-border payments initiative led by the Bank for International Settlements and the Institute of International Finance, will move towards real-value testing after publishing results from its prototype.
The project explored whether tokenisation and programmable technologies can improve wholesale cross-border payments while preserving settlement in central bank reserves. Its latest report says the prototype demonstrated atomic settlement using tokenised central bank reserves and tokenised commercial bank deposits across currencies and jurisdictions.
Atomic settlement means all parts of a transaction complete together, or none complete at all. In wholesale cross-border payments, that could reduce settlement risk by preventing one leg of a multi-party transaction from completing while another fails.
Central banks move beyond prototype work
Project Agorá brings together the BIS, the IIF, seven central banks and more than 40 private sector financial institutions. Central bank participants include the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of France on behalf of the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico and the Swiss National Bank.
The Bank of Canada has now joined the project as it moves into the next phase. Future work is expected to include real-value transactions involving certain currencies and participants.
The project’s report says the prototype showed that a shared programmable platform could support multi-currency settlement using tokenised central bank reserves and tokenised commercial bank deposits, while allowing central banks to retain autonomy over national currencies and operations.
That design point matters for institutional adoption. Central banks and commercial banks have continued to test tokenisation, but large-scale payment infrastructure has to preserve legal certainty, monetary control, privacy and compliance responsibilities across jurisdictions.
Testing always-on settlement
The prototype uses a layered architecture. Tokenised commercial bank deposits sit on a unifying ledger, while tokenised central bank reserves sit on separate jurisdictional ledgers. The model aims to support interoperability without requiring central banks to give up domestic control of their own settlement arrangements.
The report also found that privacy can be protected at both balance and transaction level, with sensitive data shared only between relevant participants. It says tokenisation, as used in the project, does not change the legal character of central bank reserves or commercial bank deposits.
Legal analysis found that settlement finality is achievable across all seven participating jurisdictions, although further work is needed on technical, operational and contractual requirements.
The project also identified future enhancements in areas such as anti-money laundering, counter-terrorist financing, sanctions compliance and fraud detection, depending on how regulatory and data-sharing frameworks develop.
Market infrastructure under pressure
Richard Baker, CEO and founder of Tokenovate, a financial market infrastructure company focused on tokenisation and distributed ledger technology, said Project Agorá’s move into further testing points to a broader infrastructure issue for financial markets.
“Project Agora’s progression into further testing highlights a growing industry realisation that continuous markets cannot operate on delayed post-trade infrastructure. Testing tokenised reserves alongside commercial bank deposits takes Agora beyond proof-of-concept and turns always-on settlement into a real test of how money, data and legal certainty move across borders.
“The challenge is structural. Cash, assets, risk and compliance have traditionally been managed in silos, with hours of lag between them. Agora’s proposition is that market infrastructure now needs to synchronise cash, assets, risk and compliance continuously across participants, jurisdiction and settlement systems, without introducing further fragmentation or operational delay.
“Ultimately, Agora’s value will depend on whether it proves that always-on settlement can function reliably at institutional scale.”
His comments reflect one of the central questions now facing tokenised finance projects: whether programmable settlement can operate across institutions, legal systems and currencies without creating another layer of market fragmentation.
Wholesale payments remain the test case
Wholesale cross-border payments remain one of the clearest use cases for tokenisation because the existing system still depends on sequential processes, multiple intermediaries and limited transparency across payment chains.
The Project Agorá report says the prototype reduced the need for sequential processing by separating information alignment from the movement of funds. In the model, payment paths, validation checks and required balance updates can be agreed before liquidity is committed and settlement takes place.
Once liquidity has been locked, settlement can happen in seconds. The platform is also designed to operate around the clock, which could reduce delays caused by mismatched operating hours across jurisdictions.
The BIS has explained that its Innovation Hub projects are experimental and designed to test technological and practical feasibility. Project Agorá has not yet proved that the model can operate in production at scale.
The next phase will therefore carry more weight. Real-value testing will show whether the prototype’s legal, technical and operational assumptions can hold when live transactions, institutional controls and cross-border regulatory requirements meet the practical demands of wholesale settlement.
