Project Agorá, a cross-border payments initiative backed by seven major central banks and more than 40 financial institutions, said on Wednesday it would move towards testing transactions using real money after successfully completing prototype trials using tokenised assets.
The project, convened by the Bank for International Settlements and the Institute of International Finance, demonstrated that wholesale cross-border transactions could be settled atomically across multiple currencies and jurisdictions using tokenised central bank reserves and tokenised commercial bank deposits. Atomic settlement allows transactions to complete simultaneously on an “all-or-nothing” basis.
According to a report published by the BIS and IIF, the prototype preserved settlement finality and complied with existing legal frameworks across the seven participating jurisdictions, which include the UK, US, eurozone, Japan, South Korea, Mexico and Switzerland. The next phase will include real-value testing involving selected currencies and institutions, with the Bank of Canada joining the initiative.
The project involves the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of France, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico and the Swiss National Bank, alongside banks including JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, BNP Paribas, UBS and MUFG Bank. The participants said the system could reduce longstanding inefficiencies in correspondent banking, where international payments pass through multiple intermediaries before settlement.
The Financial Times reported that the initiative is viewed by some participants as part of a broader effort by central banks and traditional financial institutions to respond to competition from US dollar-backed stablecoins issued by crypto groups such as Tether and Circle. The newspaper said the project could also widen divisions with Project mBridge, a rival cross-border payments platform led by the Chinese central bank that the BIS exited in 2024.
Tim Adams, chief executive of the IIF, told the Financial Times that “the key is to get this right rather than some particular timeline”. He added: “We want to make sure that we are all comfortable as it proceeds. But I’m confident it will proceed at some clip.”
The European Central Bank said findings from Project Agorá would support its Appia and Pontes initiatives, which aim to connect distributed ledger technology platforms with Europe’s TARGET settlement services. Pontes is scheduled to go live in September 2026.
The BIS and IIF said in their report that the prototype “lays the groundwork for next-generation solutions” while preserving correspondent banking as “the backbone of global payments”.
