Finance30 July, 20263 min read
BIS Says Project Agorá Processes Real Money With 22 Financial Institutions And Five Central Banks
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Five central banks and 22–28 banks completed live tokenized cross-border tests. Real money moved across borders using tokenized reserves in six currencies.
BIS live tokenized payments
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) says Project Agorá has moved beyond simulations and processed real money for the first time, with 22 financial institutions and five central banks completing 30 transactions worth roughly CHF 800,000 ($984,000) across six currencies. CoinDesk frames the same BIS pilot as a $1 million test in which 28 commercial lenders, including JPMorgan, Citi, UBS, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered, processed real-value transactions using tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits. The BIS-led trial used a shared ledger to settle corporate, interbank payments and foreign exchange settlements, and the payments settled in an average of about 80 seconds even though the prototype was not directly integrated with banks' existing payment infrastructure.
The Ledger Insights account says the currencies were the Swiss franc, euro, sterling, yen, won and dollar, and it adds that the dollar was the only one whose central bank did not take part in the live tests. CoinDesk adds that Project Agorá tokenized two forms of traditional bank money—central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits—rather than relying on stablecoins issued by private-sector firms like Circle and Tether.
Lloyds confirms atomic FX
Tech Times reports that Lloyds Banking Group completed three live tokenized deposit transactions inside Project Agorá's Real-Value Testing phase, publicly confirming real money moving through the BIS multi-central-bank settlement framework. In the headline transaction, Tech Times says a sterling-for-Swiss-franc conversion linked the FX exchange, payment instruction, and final settlement into a single simultaneous flow rather than routing them through separate systems in sequence. Tech Times describes the structure as "all-or-nothing" and says it is what payments engineers call atomic settlement, adding that it was the first time a UK retail bank publicly reported executing it across currencies in a live, regulated wholesale environment.
The same Tech Times report says the payments settled simultaneously rather than as sequential hand-offs between systems, and it quotes Peter Left, Head of Digital and Markets Innovation at Lloyds Banking Group, saying: "Moving from prototypes to live transactions is an important step in understanding how tokenized deposits could work in real payment scenarios." Tech Times also says Lloyds participated in two further transactions as a customer bank, receiving settlement legs in Swiss franc and euro payment flows using tokenized deposits.
Bank of Korea joins Hangang
Separate testing described by Crypto News says the Bank of Korea successfully completed live cross-border payment tests using tokenized central bank reserves under Project Agora, processing transactions across six currencies and multiple payment scenarios. Crypto News says the exercise covered the Korean won, U.S. dollar, euro, British pound, Swiss franc and Japanese yen, and it reports that South Korea’s participating commercial banks included KB Kookmin Bank, NongHyup Bank, Shinhan Bank, Woori Bank and Hana Bank. It adds that the participating institutions processed transactions worth about 800,000 Swiss francs across 17 payment scenarios, including payment-versus-payment foreign exchange settlements and fund transfers within the same financial group.
For the domestic leg, Crypto News says the Bank of Korea worked with NongHyup Bank and Shinhan Bank to transfer 20 million won between the two lenders using tokenized reserve funds, after receiving payment instructions from both banks. Crypto News also says the Bank of Korea linked Project Hangang with the Project Agora platform via a manual connection to validate interoperability, and it reports that additional live transaction tests would follow as the project expands to cover payment types and operational scenarios that were not included in the latest exercise.