The Bank for International Settlements has closed the live round of Project Agora, its flagship experiment in tokenized cross-border payments, and the ledger reads about CHF 800,000. Roughly $984,000. Thirty transactions, settling in an average of 80 seconds, spread across five central banks and six currencies. Almost every account of it on Thursday described 28 commercial banks taking part in Project Agora, and that number is not what the BIS published.
Twenty-eight is the total, not the bank count
The project page is careful with its wording. "Twenty-eight private sector institutions and central banks completed transactions totalling approximately CHF 800,000," it says. The split, as reported by Ledger Insights, was 22 financial institutions, five central banks and SIX, the Swiss exchange operator. So the private-sector side of the largest real-money tokenization test central banks have run was 22 firms, not 28.
The rest of the detail holds up. Individual payments ran between CHF 9,000 and CHF 125,000. About 250 staff from payments, compliance, risk and legal teams sat behind them. The 30 transactions covered 17 scenarios, which is where the two figures circulating this week come from.
| Project Agora live round | Reported figure |
|---|---|
| Total value settled | About CHF 800,000 (about $984,000) |
| Transactions | 30, across 17 scenarios |
| Range per payment | CHF 9,000 to CHF 125,000 |
| Participants | 22 financial institutions, 5 central banks, SIX |
| Currencies | USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, CHF, KRW |
| Average settlement time | About 80 seconds |
| Staff involved | About 250 |
Forty-one firms were named in 2024
In September 2024 the Institute of International Finance published the roster: 41 private firms picked for the Project Agora design phase. Two years later, 22 of them moved real balances. Not every gap means a walkout, since a firm with no stake in the six currencies had little reason to join this round. The shrinkage still sits there, unexplained by the BIS, in a project whose whole argument is that banks want this.
Some of those banks have not waited for a shared ledger. Ondo settled tokenized treasuries with JPMorgan in May, and Google spent the spring handing 120 partners a payments protocol that banks were invited to build on.
The dollar moved without the Fed behind it
Five central banks committed real reserves: the Bank of England, Banque de France, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea and the Swiss National Bank. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York appeared on the original May 2024 list of seven and processed nothing in the live round, according to Crypto Economy and Ledger Insights. Bank of Mexico is absent too, and the peso never made the currency set. Dollar legs therefore cleared on tokenized commercial bank deposits alone.
Scale is the part worth holding onto. Stablecoins set a volume record in June, while the bank-and-central-bank answer to the same problem cleared under a million francs in its first real outing. Project Agora testing runs through the fourth quarter and technical specifications are due in the first quarter of 2027. The prototype still runs outside every participant's real-time gross settlement system and core banking stack, which is what makes 80 seconds easy to hit now and hard to keep later.