Major banks settle real payments in BIS tokenized money pilot

Some of the world's largest banks have completed real cross-border payments using tokenized money in a live test led by the Bank for International Settlements, marking a concrete step toward blockchain-based settlement infrastructure for global finance.

Project Agorá Moves From Prototype to Live Transactions

Project Agorá, a public-private collaboration between central banks and commercial lenders, processed roughly $1 million in real-value transactions across six currencies — the U.S. dollar, euro, British pound, Japanese yen, Swiss franc and South Korean won, according to CoinDesk reporting published on July 30. The pilot involved five central banks and 28 commercial lenders, including JPMorgan ↗ 0.66%, Citi Citigroup Inc. ↗ 0.54%, UBS ↘ 1.33%, Deutsche Bank ↘ 0.95% and Standard Chartered.radom+1

Payments settled in an average of about 80 seconds, even though the prototype was not directly integrated with the banks' existing payment infrastructure, according to the BIS report. The pilot used tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits to settle corporate and interbank payments as well as foreign exchange transactions.coindesk+1

From Concept to Infrastructure

The live test builds on work the BIS announced in May 2026, when it published findings from Project Agorá's exploratory phase demonstrating that atomic settlement — completing cross-border wholesale transactions on an "all-or-nothing" basis — is achievable across currencies and jurisdictions. At that stage, the project said it intended to advance to real-value testing. The July pilot represents that next step.bis+1

The project now involves eight central banks, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Bank of England, Bank of France, Bank of Japan, Swiss National Bank, Bank of Korea, Bank of Mexico, and the Bank of Canada, which joined in May 2026. More than 40 private sector financial institutions participate overall.bankofcanada+1

Broader Push Toward Tokenized Settlement

The BIS pilot arrives amid a wider institutional push into tokenized payments. In June, a group of major U.S. banks including JPMorgan and Citigroup announced plans for a tokenized deposit network operated by The Clearing House, connecting on-chain activity with traditional payment rails. That system is expected to launch in the first half of 2027.wsj+1

The BIS cautioned that Project Agorá remains experimental and does not prove end-to-end production readiness. Still, the 80-second settlement across six currencies — compared with the days that conventional cross-border payments can take — illustrates why institutions are investing in the technology. As the BIS project page notes, it is "not about building a finished product" but rather evaluating "the potential of this new approach".bis+1