In 2026, the ‘Tokenized’ cross-border payment project led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) – ‘Project Agorá’ has made significant progress.
According to relevant news, the project is ready to officially enter the experimental stage involving actual fund transfer, which marks a key step from the theoretical design and prototype construction stage to verifying feasibility and efficiency in a real-world environment.
The core goal of ‘Project Agorá’ is to integrate tokenized commercial bank deposits and tokenized central bank wholesale currency into an interoperable ‘network of networks’.
Through such technical means, it aims to solve the structural friction problems such as slow speed, high cost, and cumbersome processes that exist in the current cross-border payment system.
The ultimate goal is to revolutionize the infrastructure of the global financial system, making transactions cheaper and faster while retaining key compliance controls.
The project is based on the ‘unified ledger’ concept proposed by BIS and integrates tokenized commercial bank deposits with tokenized central bank wholesale currency (i.e. wholesale central bank digital currency, wCBDC) on a shared platform.
Through this integration, the project strives to achieve ‘atomic settlement’, which can significantly reduce cross-border transaction times that might otherwise take days to seconds.
In terms of technical features, in addition to ‘atomic settlement’, the system uses blockchain technology to settle transfers between banks in different countries within seconds.
The programmability of smart contracts and platforms is used to provide new solutions and programmatically embed compliance reviews (such as anti-money laundering) into transaction processes, reducing manual intervention and delays.
‘Project Agorá’ is led by BIS and brings together seven major central banks and more than 40 regulated financial institutions.
Participating central banks include the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico, the Swiss National Bank, the Bank of England, and the latest news shows that the Bank of Canada has also joined the project.
In terms of private institutions, large banks such as JPMorgan Chase, UBS Group AG, Deutsche Bank, as well as Mastercard and Visa are participating, and more private institutions are expected to join.
The Institute of International Finance (IIF) coordinates private sector input.
The current real user testing phase is expected to last about six months, and the first batch will support major currencies such as the US dollar, euro, pound, and yen.
The results of the test will be submitted to policymakers for consideration and may determine next steps, including expanding the scope of participants and currencies.
The project is strictly limited to the wholesale field, focusing on inter-bank clearing and settlement, avoiding the political resistance that retail digital currencies may face.
Tokenization technology is becoming one of the core pillars of the future cross-border payment system.
If the project is successful, it is expected to significantly reduce cross-border payment costs and significantly improve settlement efficiency, which will not only benefit financial institutions, but may also ultimately benefit global enterprises and individual users.
It is worth noting that the ‘Multilateral Central Bank Digital Currency Bridge (mBridge)’ project jointly launched by the BIS Hong Kong Innovation Center and others has successfully graduated from BIS at the end of 2024.
With BIS withdrawing from the mBridge project, the ‘Project Agorá’ project, as an alternative plan centered on major Western economies, has significantly increased its focus on shaping the future global financial architecture.
Now, ‘Project Agorá’ has entered the real-value transaction testing phase, which is an important milestone in the modernization of global financial infrastructure and may trigger profound changes in global payment infrastructure.
