Project Agorá Cuts Cross-Border Payment Times to 80 Seconds

Eighty-Second Settlements Achieved in Global Trials

Project Agorá achieved an average settlement time of 80 seconds during its July real-value testing, according to a report updated Thursday by the Bank for International Settlements. The public-private collaboration tested the tokenization of wholesale cross-border payments across Asia, Europe, and North America, using a shared platform for tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits.

Executing Multi-Currency Volume on Programmable Rails

During the controlled trials, 28 private-sector financial institutions and central banks completed transactions totaling roughly 800,000 Swiss francs, or approximately $990,000. The testing protocol encompassed 17 distinct transaction scenarios. Individual trade values spanned from 9,000 Swiss francs up to 125,000 Swiss francs. The Bank for International Settlements noted that the real-value testing marked a major operational milestone. The platform successfully demonstrated the feasibility of settling live transactions on a multi-currency programmable infrastructure.

Regulatory Risk and Multi-Jurisdictional Compliance

Technical Capabilities and End-to-End Payment Visibility

Additional documentation linked to the updated Bank for International Settlements report detailed specific technical capabilities observed during the July trials. Participants highlighted end-to-end visibility of payment status and routing as a core operational benefit. The prototype successfully handled corporate and interbank single-currency and dual-currency payments, payment-versus-payment transactions, and intragroup bank transfers. Furthermore, the architecture proved capable of interoperating smoothly with diverse external systems across separate regulatory jurisdictions.

Bridging Digital Tokens With Central Bank Reserves

The issued tokens represented authentic monetary value, functioning as digital equivalents of central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits. This builds directly on earlier findings released in May, where the Bank for International Settlements stated that Project Agorá successfully combined tokenized commercial deposits with the trust and safety of central bank reserves on a shared platform. Real-value testing for the initiative remains ongoing as the project advances toward subsequent developmental phases.