BIS says Project Agorá can settle tokenized cross-border payments in seconds

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BIS Project Agorá settlement

Highlights

Project Agorá, developed by BIS with seven central banks and over 40 financial institutions, enables atomic settlement of tokenized cross-border payments within seconds using a two-layer blockchain.
The platform enters real-value testing with actual transactions, while further work focuses on liquidity-saving mechanisms, cybersecurity, and governance frameworks for settlement finality and risk management.
Cross-border payments reached $195 trillion in 2024 and may rise to $320 trillion by 2032, underscoring Agorá's aim to reduce costs and speed up international transactions.

Prototype design and next testing phase

As reported by Cointelegraph and the Bank for International Settlements, Project Agorá is an experimental prototype for cross-border wholesale payments developed with the Institute of International Finance and involving seven central banks and more than 40 regulated financial institutions. The BIS says the system uses tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits to complete atomic settlement, meaning all balance updates occur simultaneously or not at all.

The report says the platform relies on a two-layer blockchain architecture, with tokenized central bank reserves recorded on jurisdictional ledgers and tokenized commercial bank deposits placed on a shared unifying ledger. The BIS says this structure preserves the two-tier banking system and the singleness of money, which it describes as fundamental to financial stability, setting the model apart from stablecoin-based alternatives.

Project Agorá is now moving to real-value testing with actual transactions involving certain currencies and participants, although the BIS does not provide an implementation timeline. The report also identifies further work on liquidity-saving mechanisms, cybersecurity and governance frameworks covering settlement finality, data governance and risk management.

Implications for global payments infrastructure

The BIS says settlement takes place within seconds after funds are locked and that the platform is designed to operate around the clock, helping reduce delays caused by different operating hours across jurisdictions. It also says institutions can run anti-money laundering, sanctions and fraud checks in parallel rather than in sequence, which could lower the false-positive rates that affect current cross-border payment systems.

The report frames the project as a response to the high cost and slow speed of international transactions that continue to weigh on trade and financial activity. Cross-border payments totaled $195 trillion in 2024 and are projected to reach $320 trillion by 2032, according to FXC Intelligence data cited in the report.

The participating central banks are the Banque de France for the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico, the Swiss National Bank, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York through its New York Innovation Center and the Bank of England. Earlier this month, the Bank of England proposed extending settlement hours for its RTGS and CHAPS systems, while Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden said shared ledgers and tokenization can make payments and settlement faster and cheaper with fewer intermediaries.

In our earlier article on Federal Reserve Vice Chair Philip Jefferson’s policy stance ahead of the June FOMC meeting, we noted that the current federal funds rate range was described as leaving the Fed well positioned to respond as inflation risks remain tilted upward. Jefferson also pointed to a stable labor market with emerging downside risks, while warning that energy disruptions and import tariffs could keep inflation pressures elevated even if they ease later in the year.

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