The Bank for International Settlements and seven central banks said on May 27, 2026, that tokenizing central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits can securely deliver atomic settlement across currencies and jurisdictions — and announced the project is moving from prototype work into testing with real-value transactions.
Project Agorá, run jointly by the BIS and the Institute of International Finance, spent its exploratory phase building a prototype that demonstrated "all-or-nothing" settlement chains across multiple currencies on a shared programmable platform. The problem it targets is well-established: today's cross-border wholesale payments travel through chains of correspondent banks, creating settlement delays of days and compounding failure risk at each hop. The BIS report, published today at bis.org, found that a shared tokenized layer can eliminate that sequential exposure without altering the legal character of either central bank reserves or commercial bank deposits.
The seven central banks in the project are the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of France representing the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico, and the Swiss National Bank. More than 40 private-sector financial institutions have participated alongside them. The Bank of Canada joined this week, with additional private-sector participation anticipated as the project advances.
The report identifies several concrete findings. Atomic settlement — where the full transaction chain completes or fails as a unit — is achievable securely across all seven participating jurisdictions. Legal analysis confirmed that settlement finality is reachable under each country's existing legal framework, though further technical and contractual work is needed to formalize the requirements. Privacy can be preserved at both the balance and transaction levels using data-protection technologies that still allow regulatory compliance. The platform's modular design can support conditional and always-on payments and accommodate future improvements to anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance as regulatory frameworks develop.
The shift to real-value testing is the material step forward announced today. A prototype showing architectural feasibility is standard; running actual currency flows through the system is when structural risk, latency, and operational failure modes surface in practice. The BIS said further details will be published on both the BIS and IIF websites as the project moves forward.
The initiative lands alongside parallel work in capital markets. DTCC, Nasdaq, and ICE are each developing tokenized settlement infrastructure for equities, pointing to a broader convergence toward programmable, atomic settlement across multiple asset classes. Project Agorá is focused exclusively on wholesale payments between financial institutions — not retail payments or consumer wallets.
The BIS's role as the central bank for central banks lends the project institutional standing that distinguishes it from private or national proofs of concept. Coordination across five of the world's most systemically significant monetary institutions — the US, UK, Japan, Switzerland, and Canada, alongside the Eurosystem, Korea, and Mexico — means the legal, regulatory, and operational findings carry weight that a single-jurisdiction pilot cannot produce.
Primary sources: BIS press release, bis.org/press/p260527.htm; BIS full report, bis.org/publ/othp110.htm