The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has confirmed that its tokenization work, led through Project Agora, has completed an atomic settlement prototype and is moving into trials that will route real-value cross-border payments through the platform.
Project Agora is a public-private initiative that demonstrated tokenized cross-border settlement across seven central banks and more than 40 financial institutions. The Institute of International Finance convenes the private-sector participants. The Bank of Canada has joined the next phase, which will test live-value transactions.
The prototype proved atomic settlement: every leg of a cross-border payment settles simultaneously or not at all. Participants say that design can compress multi-day correspondent banking flows into near-instant settlement, reducing reconciliation and operational friction.
BIS Deputy General Manager Andrea Maechler described the approach as settling a transaction “in one go” once all prerequisites are present. Tim Adams of the IIF said the work should benefit the broader financial system.
Crucially, the prototype does not aim to displace correspondent banking. The BIS report calls correspondent banking the backbone of global payments and emphasizes that sanctions screening, anti-money-laundering controls and existing compliance checks are preserved. The design is intended to be compatible with SWIFT and ISO 20022 messaging rather than to replace those rails.
On the shared ledger, smart contracts enable banks to embed compliance checks, conditional triggers and workflow logic directly into transactions. The BIS flagged reduced manual intervention, fewer reconciliation steps and lower operational risk as key efficiency gains from that capability.
A separate legal analysis attached to the final report concluded that settlement finality is achievable across the participating jurisdictions, though more work is needed to define technical and contractual arrangements aligned with each legal regime.
Moving into real-value testing means actual commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves will be routed through the prototype rather than synthetic or simulated assets. BIS officials said this is the first time a BIS Innovation Hub effort of this scale will advance to live transactions.
Bank of Canada Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers noted tokenization’s potential to make payments faster, cheaper, more efficient and secure, and confirmed the bank’s participation in the upcoming tests.
The transition comes as broader tokenization initiatives gain momentum: market infrastructure firms are developing tokenized settlement for securities and analysts have flagged 2026 as a potential “tokenization supercycle” for assets and stablecoins. Industry players including the DTCC, Nasdaq and ICE have public plans or pilots for tokenized clearing and settlement.
A final Project Agora report was issued with the prototype results, and a mid-2026 update is expected to be the first major checkpoint to assess whether real-value testing scales as intended. The next phase will focus on technical integration, legal frameworks and operational procedures needed to run live cross-border tokenized payments in multiple jurisdictions.