The Bank for International Settlements said Thursday that 28 central banks and commercial banks settled roughly 800,000 Swiss francs, about $1 million, in real-value cross-border payments using tokenized reserves and deposits, marking the first live test of a system designed to replace the correspondent banking chains that still move trillions in days rather than seconds.
The mechanics of the trial
Project Agorá, launched in 2024, ran 17 transaction scenarios across Swiss francs, euros, pounds sterling, Japanese yen, South Korean won and US dollars. The average settlement time was about 80 seconds. Participants included the Bank of England, Bank of France, Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea and the Swiss National Bank alongside JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, UBS, Standard Chartered and MUFG. The prototype had already demonstrated atomic settlement across multiple currencies and jurisdictions in May; the July tests moved that capability from sandbox to live value.
What the numbers actually show
Eight hundred thousand francs is a rounding error in wholesale payments, the BIS itself calls it a milestone, not a volume target. But the figure is not the point. The point is that tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits moved across six jurisdictions without a single nostro-vostro account being debited or credited. That is a structural claim, not a speed claim, and the 80-second average is only the visible tip of it.
The counterpoint
Correspondent banking works, however slowly, and it works at scale. The Agorá model requires every participating central bank to issue tokenized reserves on a shared ledger, a governance and legal framework that does not yet exist outside the test environment. No regulator has approved this for production. No commercial bank has committed balance sheet to it. The BIS said testing will continue; it did not say when, or whether, a rulebook follows.
What to watch next
The next phase will test whether the ledger can handle the compliance checks, sanctions screening, anti-money-laundering, know-your-customer, that currently live in the correspondent layer. If those checks can be embedded in the token, the 80 seconds becomes meaningful. If they cannot, the trial is just a faster way to move a pilot.