Project Agora Moved CHF 800,000. That Was the Whole Test.

The BIS Innovation Hub has published the results of real-value testing on Project Agorá, the public-private effort to settle wholesale cross-border payments on a shared programmable platform. Tokens in the test represented real money: central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits, not simulated balances.

Thirty transactions were processed. The total value moved was approximately CHF 800,000.

The scale of the exercise

Project Agorá brings together eight central banks, including those of five major reserve currencies, and more than forty financial institutions convened by the Institute of International Finance. The real-value test used five of those central banks and twenty-two of the institutions.

The five were the Bank of England, the Bank of France acting for the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea and the Swiss National Bank. The twenty-two institutions included JPMorgan Chase, Citi, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Standard Chartered, MUFG, Mizuho, Sumitomo Mitsui, all four of Korea's large commercial banks and TD Bank N.A., whose participation was reported separately this week.

Around 250 public and private sector staff took part, across payments, compliance, risk and legal teams. The BIS frames that as building operational readiness rather than as a technical result, which is a fair description of what an exercise of this size mainly produces.

What thirty transactions looked like

The thirty transactions ran across seventeen scenarios in three use cases: dual-currency cross-border payments, payment-versus-payment, and single-currency payments in corporate, interbank and intragroup form. The scenario counts published by the BIS sum exactly to seventeen.

Individual transactions ran between CHF 9,000 and CHF 125,000, an average of about CHF 26,667. By currency the totals were JPY 86 million, KRW 120 million, USD 110,000, GBP 99,000, CHF 72,400 and EUR 29,000.

Average time from payment initiation to settlement was approximately eighty seconds. The BIS attributes this partly to the prototype not being integrated with existing real-time gross settlement and core banking systems, which is an honest caveat: eighty seconds is a prototype number, and integration would change it in both directions.

The test interacted with RTGS and core banking systems using ISO 20022 messages, specifically pacs.008, pacs.009 and camt.053. SIX acted as operational facilitator and Kaleido supplied the technology.

The dollar question

One item in the published table has no explanation attached. The US dollar is among the six currencies tested, with USD 110,000 moved across the GBP-USD scenarios and single-currency intragroup transactions. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York was named as one of the seven central banks at Project Agorá's launch in April 2024. It is not among the five testing central banks the BIS lists for this exercise.

The table does not say how tokenised dollar reserves were issued, or whether the dollar leg was handled differently from the other five currencies. We are not drawing an inference from the omission. We are recording that a reader cannot tell from what has been published.

What we could not verify

This report is based on the BIS project page as updated on 27 May 2026 and the launch media release of 3 April 2024. We did not obtain a separate technical report, and the project page does not name the eighth central bank that has joined since launch, so we cannot say who it is.

We did not confirm TD's own account of its participation. The bank's involvement is established by its presence in the BIS table as TD Bank N.A.; the trade-press report of a TD tokenised payment this week is consistent with that but we did not obtain TD's statement.

The BIS gives "over 40" financial institutions for the project without an exact figure, so the twenty-two tested are a share of an unstated denominator. The bar in Figure 1 is drawn at forty, which means the true share is 55 per cent or lower.

What to watch

Whether a full technical report follows with the dollar arrangement explained and the eighth central bank named. Whether the next phase raises transaction values by an order of magnitude, because CHF 800,000 across thirty transactions establishes that the plumbing works, not that it scales. And whether the eighty-second settlement time survives integration with production RTGS systems, which is the only version of that number that will matter.