BIS and central banks pilot instant tokenized payments

BIS and central banks are piloting Project Agorá, using tokenization to enable instant, secure, and cost-effective cross-border payments without intermediaries.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), in collaboration with seven central banks and over 40 private financial institutions, has launched real-value trials of Project Agorá. This initiative is a blockchain-based digital system designed to enhance cross-border payments. Project Agorá leverages a unified ledger and tokenized money, enabling instant and direct settlements between banks. By removing intermediaries, the system aims to reduce costs and processing times significantly. Early experiments indicate that tokenizing central bank reserves and commercial deposits can boost the speed, reliability, and security of international transactions. This marks the BIS’s largest payments experiment to date, with a final report expected in the first half of the year. As tokenization becomes more prevalent in traditional finance, the BIS continues to caution about the risks associated with stablecoins.