Several major US banks, including JPMorgan, Citi, and UBS, have begun testing tokenized cross-border payments, settling transactions in an average of 80 seconds. Twenty-eight banks total recently successfully moved funds across borders in a live test of blockchain-based settlement. Around 250 employees across payments, compliance, risk, legal, and technology teams took part in the exercise as well.

The central and traditional banks have teamed together to jumpstart Project Agorá this week. This pilot program 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, in an average of 80 seconds per transaction, per a BIS report.

The prototype demonstrates that tokenised commercial bank deposits can be successfully combined with the trust and safety of tokenised central bank reserves on a shared platform. The prototype enables atomic, multi-currency settlement of wholesale cross-border payments, which could occur on an around-the-clock basis if implemented. More broadly, by leveraging smart contracts, the platform allows financial institutions to embed workflow logic, compliance requirements and conditional payment triggers directly into transactions. This promises to reduce reconciliation burdens, manual intervention and other operational frictions – key sources of delay, cost and payment failure in today’s cross-border system.

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Additionally, the project also tested foreign exchange payments, allowing banks to exchange two currencies at the same time instead of waiting for one side of the transaction to settle before completing the other. That reduces the risk of one party sending money without receiving the other currency in return. The banks involved also said the platform made it easier to track payments from start to finish and worked alongside existing payment systems instead of replacing them.