The BIS tokenization business has passed the atomic settlement prototype stage and will move into real-value cross-border payment experiments.
summary
- The Agora project demonstrated cross-border token settlement across seven central banks and more than 40 financial institutions.
- The Bank of Canada joined in on Wednesday, setting real value transactions as the next test marker.
- The prototype maintains rather than replaces correspondent banking, sanctions checking, and SWIFT compliance.
The BIS tokenization business has passed the atomic settlement prototype stage and will move into real-value cross-border payment experiments. The Bank for International Settlements confirmed the move on Wednesday.
The Agora Project, a public-private collaboration with seven central banks and more than 40 financial institutions, Show Tokenized commercial bank deposits can be settled against tokenized central bank reserves on an irrevocably shared platform across jurisdictions.
Why the BIS token prototype is important for global banks
The prototype demonstrated atomic settlement, where each part of a cross-border transaction is cleared at the same instant or not at all. Participating banks said the design compresses corresponding flows that currently take days into seconds.
“Once you know you have everything to manage the deal, you can settle it in one go,” Andrea Maechler, deputy director general of the Bank for International Settlements, said in remarks accompanying the release. The Bank of Canada also joined the project on Wednesday.
Participants in the Agora project include the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of France, the Swiss National Bank, the Bank of Mexico, and the Bank of Korea. The Institute of International Finance brings together the private sector.
“This will benefit the entire financial system,” Tim Adams, president of the Institute of International Finance, said in a statement issued simultaneously with the announcement.
How the unified ledger fits into existing payment paths
The prototype maintains the integrity of correspondent banking rather than replacing it. The 97-page final report from the Bank for International Settlements describes correspondent banking as “the backbone of global payments” and stresses that sanctions screening and anti-money laundering controls remain within the system.
This framing is intentional. The Agora project is not designed to eliminate intermediaries between banks as the original stablecoin networks intended, but to give existing institutions faster SWIFT and ISO 20022 compliant paths. Stable coin The corridors are structural.
Smart contracts on the platform allow banks to embed compliance checks, conditional payment triggers and workflow logic directly into transactions. The report cited reduced compromise, fewer manual interventions, and reduced operational risk as the main efficiency gains.
A separate legal analysis accompanying the report found that a final settlement could be achieved across all seven participating jurisdictions. More work is needed on technical and contractual requirements tailored to each legal system.
What are the real value test changes for coding
The next phase will move beyond artificial transfers and funnel actual funds through the prototype, marking the first time a BIS Innovation Center effort of this scale has ventured out to live transactions.
Caroline Rogers, senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, said tokenization “has the potential to make these payments faster, cheaper, more efficient and more secure,” underscoring the central bank’s involvement in the next testing phase.
The timing fits the broader spectrum Coding Shift between Wall Street firms. DTCC plans to introduce token settlement for stocks, ETFs and Treasuries. Both Nasdaq and ICE are developing blockchain-based systems for tokenized stocks.
Bernstein analysts have called 2026 a “token supercycle,” with supply of stablecoins and demand for Treasuries across the chain. climbing At the end of the year.
The final report on the Agora project is expected to be issued in the first half of this year. The mid-2026 update will be the first checkpoint to see if the true value test holds up on a large scale.
