Project Agorá tests real-value payments using tokenised bank money

BIS reports that Project Agorá conducted real-value trials in July 2026, with 28 financial institutions and central banks completing approximately CHF 800,000 of transactions. The programme covered 17 scenarios. This September briefing covers those reported trials, which tested a prototype rather than a service open for routine commercial use.

The architecture combines tokenised commercial-bank deposits and central-bank reserves. In the BIS's design, participating institutions can coordinate related payment movements on a programmable platform. Atomic settlement means that the linked movements complete together when their conditions are satisfied, reducing the risk of one leg completing while another does not.

The distinction matters in a cross-currency transaction. Agreeing to exchange two balances is different from ensuring that both transfers finish. A common execution rule can address that coordination problem, while the institutions still need to establish permissions, available funds and the legal meaning of completion.

The trials provide operational evidence as well as a technical milestone. BIS reports an average of about 80 seconds from initiation to settlement in the controlled exercise, while noting that the prototype was not integrated with existing RTGS and core banking systems. That timing should not be treated as an end-to-end service guarantee for a production network.

Strategic impact

Impact

High

Horizon

Prototype testing; no production launch date

Regions

Asia · Europe · North America

Affected sectors

Banking · Payment infrastructure

Key players

BIS · Central banks · Commercial banks

For banks, the opportunity is to reduce the work needed to coordinate and reconcile payments across separate systems. The commercial case would depend on how much of that work disappears in practice, and how much returns as integration, governance or exception-handling effort around the new platform.

A shared ledger also raises concrete operating questions. Who can initiate a transaction? When must funds be available? Who investigates a payment that was correctly executed but incorrectly instructed? A faster settlement mechanism does not settle these decisions. They determine the staffing, controls and support arrangements required to offer a dependable service.

For businesses using cross-border payments, greater visibility could be as useful as speed. Knowing that a payment is awaiting a specific approval allows a treasury team to act; a generic pending status does not. Our assessment is that successful adoption will require clearer operating information and fewer manual handoffs across the whole payment journey, alongside the settlement improvement itself.

What to watch next

The next meaningful evidence would be broader integration and repeated operation with disclosed exception rates. A convincing comparison would measure the time until the recipient can use the funds, the balances institutions must hold to support transactions, and the effort needed to resolve failures.

Participation and governance will matter alongside technical performance. A platform with strong internal execution may still have limited reach if important counterparties cannot join or if operating responsibilities remain unclear. Watch whether further trials expose these constraints and publish how they are resolved. That would show progress toward an operable network rather than simply a larger demonstration.