Some of the world’s biggest banks have completed real cross-border payments using tokenized money in a test led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), another sign that tokenization is moving into the plumbing of global finance.
Project Agorá, which brings together five central banks and 28 commercial lenders including JPMorgan, Citi, UBS, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered, processed roughly $1 million (CHF 800,000) in real-value transactions across six currencies — the U.S. dollar, euro, British pound, Japanese yen, Swiss franc and South Korean won.
The pilot used tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits to settle corporate, interbank payments perand foreign exchange settlements. The payments settled in an average of about 80 seconds, even though the prototype was not directly integrated with banks’ existing payment infrastructure, the BIS report said.
The project fits into a broader shift as…
