(5 August 2026 – Switzerland) Twenty-eight banks including JPMorgan, Citi and UBS successfully completed a Bank for International Settlements (BIS) pilot settling tokenised cross border payments.
Project Agorá brings together five central banks and 28 commercial lenders including JPMorgan, Citi, UBS, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered to test whether tokenisation can modernise the infrastructure underpinning international payments by reinventing how banks move regulated funds across borders – not attempting to reinvent money.
The Project Agorá successful pilot encompassing 28 banks, 30 cross border transactions and six currencies all settled within 80 seconds is an important milestone and indication that the industry is maturing quickly.
The pilot explored how to modernise cross border payments without replacing the incumbent “rails” for the banking system. Unlike stablecoins such as USDC or USDT, Project Agorá settled payments using tokenised central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits.
Although the pilot only moved US$1 million, what it is testing could reshape how almost US$200 trillion of cross border payments and “money movement” is conducted each year.
“While the use of tokenized deposits or wholesale CBDCs may still be attracting most of the attention, there is a shift in focus from technology choices to infrastructure design that is equally significant. I see the conversation increasingly turning to how liquidity, FX, payment execution and settlement are coordinated across institutions to deliver faster, safer and more transparent cross-border payments” commented UNITE Global Ambassador, Stan Cole.
“What follows should be to recognise that there may be more than one architectural path toward those objectives.”