BIS Tests Tokenized Money for Cross-Border Payments
Project Agorá, which brings together five central banks and 28 commercial lenders, processed about $1 million (CHF 800,000) in real-value transactions. Participating lenders included JPMorgan, Citi, UBS, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered. The transactions covered six currencies: the US 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 and interbank payments as well as foreign exchange transactions. Payments settled in an average of about 80 seconds, even though the prototype was not directly integrated with banks’ existing payment infrastructure, according to the BIS report. Somali communities that use international money-transfer services have reason to watch how such trials develop. The 80-second result belongs to a prototype, while any future effect on everyday transfers will depend on deployment in real payment systems.
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