Project Agorá Settles Roughly $1 Million Across Six Currencies in Trial to Modernize Correspondent Banking
Oct. 21, 2026 • Deep Dive • Digital Assets
Project Agorá completed real-value testing in July 2026, settling about CHF 800,000, or roughly $1 million, across 17 transaction scenarios. The trials averaged approximately 80 seconds for settlement across six currencies without direct integration into core real-time gross settlement systems. A May report from the Bank for International Settlements and the Institute of International Finance confirmed the technical feasibility of atomic settlement and legal finality across participating jurisdictions.
The initiative combines tokenized central bank reserves on jurisdictional ledgers with tokenized commercial bank deposits on a shared ledger. It is intended to modernize, not eliminate, correspondent banking and the two-tier monetary framework. More than 40 private institutions participate in the wider project, while a subgroup of 28 financial institutions and central banks conducted the real-value tests. The Bank of Canada has also joined the central bank consortium, alongside the original seven participants.
Project Agorá completed a real-value testing phase in July 2026, settling approximately 800,000 Swiss francs, or roughly $1 million, across 17 transaction scenarios. The trials averaged about 80 seconds for settlement across six currencies without direct integration into core real-time gross settlement infrastructure. The results give the cross-border payments initiative a practical test of its shared-ledger architecture, while leaving a distinction between a successful trial and a replacement for existing banking arrangements.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) launched Project Agorá with the Institute of International Finance (IIF) to test a multi-currency programmable platform for wholesale cross-border payments. Rather than remove correspondent banks from the process, the project is explicitly structured to reinforce and upgrade the correspondent banking model and the two-tier monetary framework, according to the BIS, participating central banks and member banks.
What the trials established
The July tests covered the US dollar, euro, British pound, Japanese yen, South Korean won and Swiss franc. A subgroup of 28 financial institutions and central banks carried out the real-value testing. That is narrower than the project’s broader participation: more than 40 commercial banks and other private institutions are involved in the initiative.
The reported average settlement time describes the trial transactions, not every cross-border payment. The tests also did not directly integrate the platform with core real-time gross settlement systems, which central banks use to settle payments. Those boundaries matter when assessing what the results show: Agorá has demonstrated settlement in defined scenarios, but the supplied findings do not establish that the architecture is operating as a general replacement for existing payment networks.
On May 27, 2026, before the real-value tests concluded, the BIS and IIF published a 97-page findings report confirming the technical feasibility of atomic settlement and legal finality across the participating jurisdictions. Atomic settlement means the linked parts of a transaction settle together, rather than leaving one part completed while another remains outstanding. Legal finality concerns whether a completed settlement is recognized as final under the applicable legal framework.
How the two-layer design works
Agorá separates two forms of money in its architecture. Tokenized central bank reserves are held on jurisdictional ledgers, while tokenized commercial bank deposits sit on a shared unifying ledger. In this context, tokenization represents existing forms of money on ledgers designed to coordinate transactions; it is not, under the project’s legal assessments, a change in what those reserves or deposits are.
Those assessments found that tokenization under the Agorá architecture does not alter the legal characterization of either central bank reserves or commercial bank deposits in any participating jurisdiction. That distinction is central to the project’s approach: it tests whether banks can coordinate payments using shared digital infrastructure while retaining the established separation between central bank money and commercial bank liabilities.
The platform is also designed to run anti-money laundering, customer due diligence, sanctions and fraud screening simultaneously, rather than passing those checks sequentially across intermediaries. This is an architectural feature of the system, not evidence that compliance checks can be dispensed with. The shared-ledger approach changes how participating institutions coordinate those checks and settlement steps; it does not remove the need for them.
Modernizing an existing model
The original central bank group comprised the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of France representing the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico and the Swiss National Bank. The Bank of Canada has since joined the consortium. Private-sector participants in the broader initiative include JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, UBS, BNP Paribas, CaixaBank and Standard Chartered.
The scale of wholesale payments helps explain the focus. They account for approximately 91% of global cross-border payment value, according to the figures in the research package. The broader cross-border payments market reached $195 trillion in 2024 and is projected to grow to $320 trillion by 2032. Those figures describe the market the project addresses, not a forecast of adoption for Agorá itself.
The central question, therefore, is not whether one shared ledger has made correspondent banking obsolete. Agorá’s design retains central bank and commercial bank money as distinct, legally recognized components while testing whether they can be coordinated more directly for cross-border settlement. The July trials provide evidence from real-value transactions; their defined scope and lack of direct core settlement-system integration limit what can be concluded beyond them.
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.