BIS-Led Project Agorá Completes Million-Dollar Cross-Border Tokenized Payment Test

TechFlow news, July 31, according to CoinDesk, Project Agorá, led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), recently completed a cross-border payment test with real funds, with participants including 28 commercial banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, and five central banks, processing a total of approximately $1 million (approximately 800,000 Swiss francs) in real transactions, covering six currencies: US dollar, euro, pound sterling, Japanese yen, Swiss franc, and South Korean won.

The test utilized tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits, settling funds on a shared ledger with an average settlement time of about 80 seconds. Unlike traditional cross-border payments that require intermediation through multiple correspondent banks, the platform achieves shared single ownership records and supports synchronized bilateral foreign exchange settlement, effectively reducing principal risk. The BIS stated that the platform can operate in parallel with existing payment systems, rather than replacing them.