BIS-Led Project Agorá Reveals Tokenization Could Enhance Cross-Border Payment Efficiency With 40+ Institutions

According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the latest research from Project Agorá demonstrates that tokenization technology can significantly improve settlement speed, reconciliation efficiency, and reduce transaction failures and operational risks in cross-border payments. The project, co-led by BIS with seven central banks and over 40 financial institutions including the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, Bank of Japan, and Swiss National Bank, found that tokenizing central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits enables atomic settlement across currencies and jurisdictions, ensuring transactions either complete simultaneously or fail together.

Project Agorá has completed simulation testing and plans to advance to real-value transaction testing, exploring live settlement applications for select currencies and institutions.