Project Agorá Settles About $1 Million Across Six Currencies in Live Tokenised Deposit Tests
Oct. 26, 2026 • Deep Dive • Digital Assets
Project Agorá settled approximately CHF 800,000 in live, multi-currency transactions during a July 2026 testing phase. The work examined a cross-border payment model that places tokenised commercial bank deposits on a shared ledger while holding tokenised central bank reserves on jurisdictional ledgers. Five central banks participated directly in live-reserve settlement, although the project’s wider central-bank group has since expanded to eight with the Bank of Canada’s entry.
The project reports an average settlement time of 80 seconds across six currencies and uses smart contracts to run anti-money laundering, sanctions and fraud checks simultaneously. Legal analyses found that tokenisation did not change the underlying character of deposits or reserves in participating jurisdictions. The findings support further work on deposit-based wholesale settlement, but the supplied research does not establish that the approach outperforms stablecoins. The Eurosystem plans to draw on Agorá’s architecture for Projects Pontes and Appia.
Project Agorá settled approximately CHF 800,000, or roughly $1 million, in live multi-currency transactions during a July 2026 testing phase. The result moves a model based on tokenised commercial bank deposits beyond the prototype findings reported in May, while leaving open the question of whether it performs better than stablecoins in wholesale cross-border settlement.
The project is testing how banks could transfer deposits across borders using a shared programmable ledger alongside tokenised central bank reserves. Its reported average settlement time was 80 seconds across six currencies: the US dollar, euro, British pound, Japanese yen, Swiss franc and South Korean won. The supplied research does not identify a comparable stablecoin test, so the timing cannot establish which model is faster.
What the live testing established
Five central banks participated directly in the July real-value testing: the Bank of England, Bank of France, Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea and Swiss National Bank. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Bank of Mexico were part of the original seven-central-bank group but did not execute live-reserve settlement transactions in that phase. The Bank of Canada has since joined Project Agorá as an eighth participating central bank.
That distinction matters when assessing the test’s scope. The project involved six fiat currencies, but participation in the wider initiative should not be confused with a central bank settling a live transaction using its reserves. The reported CHF 800,000 is an aggregate value for the live multi-currency activity, not evidence of deployment at commercial scale.
The supplied research describes the July workload in differing ways, referring to both transaction scenarios and individual transactions. Those counts are not directly comparable, so the aggregate settlement value and participating currencies provide the clearer account of what was tested.
How the deposit-based design works
Project Agorá uses a two-layer programmable ledger architecture. Tokenised commercial bank deposits sit on a shared unifying ledger, while tokenised central bank reserves are held on jurisdictional ledgers. Tokenisation represents an existing financial claim on a ledger; it does not, by itself, turn a bank deposit into a different kind of money.
The design aims to retain the two-tier banking system, in which customers hold claims on commercial banks and banks settle using central bank reserves. That distinction is central to the case for tokenised deposits rather than private stablecoins. Central banks prioritise the deposit approach because it preserves that structure and the intended singleness of money across commercial and central bank money.
The platform also allows anti-money laundering, sanctions and fraud checks to run simultaneously through smart contracts, rather than sequentially across correspondent intermediaries. That changes the proposed sequence of payment processing; the live test alone does not demonstrate how the model would perform across every bank, jurisdiction or payment flow.
Legal and regulatory analyses across the participating jurisdictions found that tokenisation did not alter the underlying legal character of commercial bank deposits or central bank reserves, and that settlement finality was valid. Those findings address a prerequisite for using ledger-based representations of existing money, alongside the technical question of whether the transactions can be processed.
Enterprise blockchain software firm Kaleido supplied the underlying technology platform for the Project Agorá prototype.
What remains to be proved
The potential market is substantial: wholesale cross-border payment flows were estimated at $195 trillion in 2024, representing roughly 91% of global cross-border payment value. The July test, however, settled a much smaller amount. It provides evidence about the feasibility of live settlement under the tested arrangements, not a measure of how the platform would handle that broader volume.
Nor does the research provide a like-for-like comparison with stablecoins on cost, speed, liquidity requirements or operational resilience. Agorá’s reported settlement time and legal findings make a case for further testing of tokenised deposits, but they do not show that deposits outperform another payment instrument.
The Eurosystem has said architectural insights from Agorá will inform Project Pontes, which is scheduled to connect distributed ledger platforms to TARGET Services, and Project Appia, which outlines a longer-term tokenised financial ecosystem for Europe. Those plans show where the work may feed into future infrastructure. They do not amount to a timetable for broad commercial use of the Agorá model.
Mastercard and Visa are extending stablecoin technology into the systems that settle card payments between financial institutions, while leaving the consumer checkout experience largely unchanged. Mastercard completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK in August 2026 and has expanded its network’s settlement options to include regulated stablecoins. Visa, meanwhile, is working with Stripe-owned Bridge and Lead Bank on on-chain settlement for card programs. The shift became more concrete in September, when SoFi Bank moved its credit and debit card issuing portfolio to live settlement using its bank-issued SoFiUSD. That portfolio represents more than $25 billion in annualized card volume, a measure distinct from the value settled in stablecoins. Visa separately reported an annualized stablecoin settlement run rate exceeding $25 billion in October. The networks’ initiatives target the back-end movement and reconciliation of funds, including periods when traditional bank settlement rails are unavailable; they do not require merchants to accept cryptocurrency.
The European Central Bank has launched Pontes, a bridge connecting tokenised-asset platforms to the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services for wholesale settlement in central bank money. The arrangement enables atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement, in which an asset and its payment move together. It does not yet make wholesale settlement available around the clock: Pontes depends on T2 operating hours and requires tokenised central bank money balances to be defunded at the end of the day. ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone says the Eurosystem plans to extend Pontes operating hours substantially by mid-2027 and reach 24/7/365 availability in 2028. Separately, the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Agorá has tested cross-border payments using a shared programmable ledger that brings tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves into a single settlement process. Both initiatives address delays and liquidity demands in wholesale payments, but neither makes continuous, cross-border settlement available today.
Project Agorá’s real-value testing settled 30 live, multi-currency transactions worth approximately CHF 800,000, with atomic settlement averaging about 80 seconds. The tests involved 28 commercial institutions and five central banks. The result shows how tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves could support faster cross-border settlement, though it does not establish that settlement latency has been eliminated. The project’s prototype found that tokenisation did not change the legal character or regulatory obligations of deposits and reserves. Its design also let participating institutions conduct compliance checks concurrently. Seven more commercial banks joined in September 2026, taking private-sector participation to nearly 50 institutions. At Sibos in October, banking executives described the testing pipeline as a step towards production trials alongside the European Central Bank’s Pontes platform. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York did not participate in the live test transactions, an important qualification for the US dollar tests.
Ripple’s final federal trust bank charter, a Moody’s investment-grade rating for RLUSD and a planned expansion of the stablecoin’s availability on Coinbase have strengthened its position as a regulated digital dollar. Coinbase said Global Exchange access, including eligibility to use RLUSD as trading collateral, will follow its initial retail and prime rollout. Moody’s assigned RLUSD an A2 long-term deposit rating and a P-1 short-term rating, the first investment-grade rating it has given a stablecoin. The distinctions behind those developments matter. Ripple National Trust Bank manages RLUSD’s reserve collateral, but the legal issuer remains Standard Custody & Trust Company, a New York-regulated Ripple subsidiary. The national trust bank is uninsured and cannot take commercial retail deposits or extend credit. Moody’s also noted that holders do not currently own the underlying reserves directly and that statutory bankruptcy protections depend on implementation of the GENIUS Act, whose rules take effect in January 2027.
Ramp partnered with Stripe and Bridge in July 2026 to deploy stablecoin rails for business bill payments and yield-bearing stablecoin accounts funded through standard fiat bank accounts. The arrangement shows how stablecoins can be incorporated into familiar payment workflows without requiring businesses to fund every transaction with digital assets. The economics depend on more than the cost of moving a token on-chain. Stripe charges merchants 1.5% for stablecoin checkout transactions, versus its standard card-processing fee of 2.9% plus $0.30; neither figure establishes the price of Ramp’s bill-payment service. Businesses receiving fiat may also face foreign-exchange and off-ramp costs, typically 0.3% to 2.0% when converting into local banking systems. Domestic clearing networks and compliance checks remain part of end-to-end delivery. Bridge’s issuance and transfer tools, alongside its conditional U.S. trust-bank approval, illustrate the infrastructure behind those payments—but not the elimination of every payment cost.
StraitsX has opened onboarding for digital payment token providers across more than 100 markets through an expanded card-issuing architecture developed with Visa. Integration documentation published on 26 October 2026 describes a multi-BIN model that combines issuing sponsorship, transaction authorization, compliance screening and fiat clearing. The approach lets participating providers build stablecoin-backed card products while merchants continue to receive conventional fiat payments through Visa’s network. StraitsX says its card gross transaction value rose 40-fold year on year from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025, while cards issued across Asia increased 83-fold. On-chain issuer telemetry recorded monthly card transaction volume of $310 million to $438 million through October 2026. The company’s stated $6 billion annualized card transaction figure is distinct from its cumulative $70 billion in processed stablecoin volume. StraitsX and Visa have also scheduled demonstrations of agentic payments for November 2026.