Project Agorá Tests Tokenised Deposits as Banks Weigh Alternatives to Stablecoins
Oct. 20, 2026 • Deep Dive • Digital Assets
Project Agorá completed a controlled real-value testing phase in late July 2026, processing approximately 800,000 Swiss francs across 30 live transactions in six currencies. The project records tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves on a shared programmable ledger, with an average initiation-to-settlement time of about 80 seconds. The Bank of Canada has joined as its eighth participating central bank, while commercial financial institutions are taking on deeper operational testing responsibilities.
Convened by the Bank for International Settlements and the Institute of International Finance, Agorá is examining a model for cross-border payments that preserves the roles of commercial and central bank money. BIS General Manager Pablo Hernández de Cos argued in August that stablecoins lack the institutional credibility and singleness of money needed for systemic settlement. The tests demonstrate live transactions, but conflicting participant counts and uncertainty about the US dollar settlement leg limit broader conclusions about the project’s results.
Project Agorá completed a controlled phase of real-value testing in late July 2026, processing approximately 800,000 Swiss francs ($990,000) through 30 live transactions across six currencies. The cross-border payments project uses tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves on a shared programmable ledger, with an average time of approximately 80 seconds from payment initiation to settlement.
The results offer a live test of an approach backed by central banks and commercial lenders as they assess how to make international payments faster without replacing regulated bank deposits with privately issued stablecoins. The Bank of Canada has joined Agorá as its eighth participating central bank, and commercial financial institutions are taking on deeper operational testing responsibilities.
What the live tests showed
The transactions covered Swiss francs, euros, British pounds, Japanese yen, South Korean won and US dollars. Their total value and number make this a controlled test rather than evidence of performance at the volume of a production payments network. They do, however, move the project beyond a design exercise by testing transfers of real value.
Project Agorá is convened by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Institute of International Finance (IIF). It brings together eight central banks and more than 40 global commercial banks. Web3 infrastructure firm Kaleido develops and maintains the programmable ledger underlying the project.
The project reports an average initiation-to-settlement time of about 80 seconds. That measure covers the interval from starting a payment to completing its settlement; it does not, by itself, establish how the system would perform at a larger scale or under routine commercial conditions. The current results are best read as evidence of what the controlled testing environment achieved.
How tokenised bank money works
A tokenised deposit is a digital representation of money owed by a commercial bank to its customer. In Agorá’s design, such deposits sit alongside tokenised central bank reserves—the funds banks hold with central banks—on a shared programmable ledger. Smart contracts coordinate the different currency legs so they settle atomically: the linked parts of a payment complete together rather than leaving one side settled while another remains outstanding.
The architecture keeps commercial bank money distinct from central bank reserves. It also allows each central bank to retain sovereign domestic control over its own currency ledger while enabling the separate ledgers to coordinate multi-currency payments. This distinction matters because the project is not proposing that a single private issuer supply the money used for all settlement legs.
For banks, the design addresses the delays associated with correspondent banking chains while retaining deposits within the regulated banking system. The approximately 80-second average recorded in testing illustrates the intended improvement in payment speed, though the controlled transactions cannot establish how much time a future deployment would save for every payment route.
Why stablecoins remain part of the debate
The choice of tokenised deposits is also a choice about the structure of money. Commercial bank deposits are liabilities of regulated credit institutions and remain subject to banking capital and resolution regimes when tokenised. Privately issued stablecoins do not carry deposit insurance or direct access to central bank lender-of-last-resort facilities.
Keeping deposits within banks also matters to lenders’ funding. A broad shift from deposits into stablecoins could draw funding away from commercial banks and affect their lending capacity. Agorá’s model instead seeks faster cross-border transfers while preserving the two-tier monetary system, in which commercial banks provide deposit money and central banks provide the reserve money used for settlement between banks.
In August 2026, BIS General Manager Pablo Hernández de Cos told the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium that stablecoins lack the institutional credibility and singleness of money required for systemic settlement. His argument positions tokenised deposits as a foundation for cross-border payments, rather than treating a faster digital transfer mechanism alone as sufficient. It is an institutional case for the model, not a finding that Agorá’s tests have resolved every operational question.
Questions the results leave open
Project reports differ on the number of organisations involved in the real-value testing scenarios. A BIS overview gives 28 financial institutions and central banks, while a technical breakdown lists 22 commercial financial institutions and five central banks, or 27 entities. Those counts should not be treated as interchangeable.
There is also a limit to what can be concluded about the US dollar leg. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York participated in the initial prototype design phase but did not execute live settlements during the July tests. The available information therefore does not establish that the dollar transactions settled against direct live central bank reserves rather than through commercial bank proxies.
Agorá’s next operational work falls more heavily to commercial financial institutions under its expanded testing mandate. Its controlled transactions show how tokenised bank money and coordinated ledgers can support live cross-currency settlement. The unresolved participation and dollar-settlement details remain important when judging how closely those tests represent a broader operating system.
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.