News, data and analysis on tokenized assets, market design and digital economic systems.
Owned by its member central banks and host to the committees that write global prudential and payments standards; Chapter III of its 2026 Annual Economic Report concludes stablecoins fail all three of its tests for general-purpose money.
Owned by its member central banks and serving as their forum for monetary and financial cooperation, it hosts the committees that write global prudential and payments standards. Chapter III of its 2026 Annual Economic Report tests stablecoins against the singleness of money, the elasticity of supply and payment integrity, and concludes they fail all three as general-purpose money. Its Innovation Hub runs Project Agorá, which has prototyped atomic multi-currency settlement of tokenized reserves and commercial bank deposits on one platform.
Developments in which Bank for International Settlements is a named party, newest first.
The BIS says twenty-eight institutions and central banks moved around CHF800,000 of live tokenized deposits across borders, the first time the project has put real value at stake.
Bank of China settled the two largest transactions recorded on mBridge, the multi-central-bank digital currency platform, in June and July 2026.
The Bank for International Settlements published the money and payments chapter of its 2026 Annual Economic Report on 23 June 2026, arguing that stablecoins fall short on singleness, elasticity and integrity of money.
The Bank for International Settlements published real-value testing results for Project Agora on 29 July 2026. Twenty-eight private sector institutions and central banks completed transactions across seventeen scenarios worth about CHF800,000 in total, settling in roughly eighty seconds on average on a platform where tokenized commercial bank deposits move alongside tokenized central bank reserves.
The Bank for International Settlements reported that the Project Agorá prototype showed tokenisation of central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits can support atomic multi-currency settlement across jurisdictions while leaving each central bank in control of its own money and preserving transaction privacy. Seven central banks and more than 40 private financial institutions took part, and the project said the work would advance to real-value transactions in certain currencies.
The central bank partners in Project mBridge announced that the cross-border multi-CBDC settlement platform had reached minimum viable product stage and invited further participants. The founding central banks were the Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, the Digital Currency Institute of the People's Bank of China and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority; the Saudi Central Bank joined as a full participant and more than 26 central banks were observing members.
The Bank for International Settlements announced Project Agorá, a public-private effort to test tokenised commercial bank deposits alongside tokenised wholesale central bank money on a programmable platform. Seven central banks joined, working with private financial firms convened by the Institute of International Finance.
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision published its final standard on the prudential treatment of banks' cryptoasset exposures, splitting assets into a group eligible for existing capital rules and a group carrying a punitive treatment. The implementation date for member jurisdictions was set at 1 January 2025.
The Digital Currency Institute of the People's Bank of China and the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates joined the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the Bank of Thailand in a project hosted by the BIS Innovation Hub Centre in Hong Kong to build a prototype for cross-border foreign exchange payments on distributed ledger technology. The work, which grew out of Inthanon-LionRock, targeted payment-versus-payment settlement across jurisdictions and later became known as mBridge.
What issued, what settled, what the supervisors changed, with the numbers behind it and a note on what the numbers do not show. One email, Thursday mornings.
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