Some of the world's biggest banks have completed real cross-border payments using tokenized money in a test led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), another sign that tokenization is moving into the plumbing of global finance.
Project Agorá, which brings together five central banks and 28 commercial lenders including JPMorgan, Citi, UBS, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered, processed roughly $1 million (CHF 800,000) in real-value transactions across six currencies — the U.S. dollar, euro, British pound, Japanese yen, Swiss franc and South Korean won.
The pilot used tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits to settle corporate and interbank payments as well as foreign exchange settlements. The payments settled in an average of about 80 seconds, even though the prototype was not directly integrated with banks' existing payment infrastructure, according to the BIS report.
The project fits into a broader shift as stablecoins and tokenized assets gain traction across global finance. Asset managers have begun issuing tokenized money market and private credit funds, while stablecoins are increasingly being used for cross-border payments and corporate treasury operations. Project Agorá explores whether the same technology can modernize the infrastructure banks use to move money internationally.
