Project Agorá settles real money, six currencies in eighty seconds
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.
What happened
The Bank for International Settlements published results from Project Agora's real-value testing on 29 July. Twenty-eight private sector institutions and central banks completed transactions across seventeen scenarios, each worth between CHF9,000 and CHF125,000 or the local currency equivalent and about CHF800,000 in total, on a shared platform where tokenized commercial bank deposits settle alongside tokenized central bank reserves. Average time from payment initiation to settlement was approximately eighty seconds. About 250 public and private sector staff took part. The tests covered single-currency, dual-currency and payment-versus-payment transfers, and demonstrated interoperability with existing real-time gross settlement and core banking systems over ISO 20022 messaging. Lloyds Banking Group separately confirmed three transactions, one of which linked foreign exchange conversion, payment and settlement into a single step.
Why it matters
Agora is the largest public and private test of the unified ledger idea the BIS has been arguing for since 2023, and this is the point at which it crossed from prototype into real money. The May report promised real-value testing; it has now happened, with some of the world's largest correspondent banks taking part. Eighty seconds against a correspondent chain that can take days is not a marginal improvement in service. If tokenized deposits settling against central bank money can be made routine, the economics of cross-border payment intermediation change, and so does the float and fee income that currently sits inside the delay.
What is not settled
Accounts of the trial's size disagree and the desk records the disagreement rather than resolving it: the BIS page says twenty-eight private sector institutions and central banks together, CoinDesk counts twenty-eight commercial lenders plus five central banks, and Ledger Insights reports twenty-two financial institutions and five central banks. The BIS has given no timetable for moving from testing to production, and the page does not break the results out by currency, so how much of the eighty-second average belongs to the easier corridors is not visible.
Institutions in this story
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Bank for International Settlements
Standards body
Published the real-value results on 29 July, the point at which the unified ledger design it has argued for since 2023 moved from prototype to live settlement with money at stake.
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Institute of International Finance
Standards body
Convenes the private sector side of the project, which is what allows twenty-eight commercial institutions and central banks to test on one platform without any of them owning it.
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Lloyds Banking Group plc
Bank
Completed three of the live transactions, including one combining foreign exchange conversion, payment and settlement into a single step, which is the arrangement correspondent banking currently charges for keeping apart.
On the record
Project Agora settles live tokenized transactions in six currencies
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.