Project Agorá Settles Roughly $1 Million Across Six Currencies in Trial to Modernize Correspondent Banking
Oct. 21, 2026 • Deep Dive • Digital Assets
Project Agorá completed real-value testing in July 2026, settling about CHF 800,000, or roughly $1 million, across 17 transaction scenarios. The trials averaged approximately 80 seconds for settlement across six currencies without direct integration into core real-time gross settlement systems. A May report from the Bank for International Settlements and the Institute of International Finance confirmed the technical feasibility of atomic settlement and legal finality across participating jurisdictions.
The initiative combines tokenized central bank reserves on jurisdictional ledgers with tokenized commercial bank deposits on a shared ledger. It is intended to modernize, not eliminate, correspondent banking and the two-tier monetary framework. More than 40 private institutions participate in the wider project, while a subgroup of 28 financial institutions and central banks conducted the real-value tests. The Bank of Canada has also joined the central bank consortium, alongside the original seven participants.
Project Agorá completed a real-value testing phase in July 2026, settling approximately 800,000 Swiss francs, or roughly $1 million, across 17 transaction scenarios. The trials averaged about 80 seconds for settlement across six currencies without direct integration into core real-time gross settlement infrastructure. The results give the cross-border payments initiative a practical test of its shared-ledger architecture, while leaving a distinction between a successful trial and a replacement for existing banking arrangements.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) launched Project Agorá with the Institute of International Finance (IIF) to test a multi-currency programmable platform for wholesale cross-border payments. Rather than remove correspondent banks from the process, the project is explicitly structured to reinforce and upgrade the correspondent banking model and the two-tier monetary framework, according to the BIS, participating central banks and member banks.
What the trials established
The July tests covered the US dollar, euro, British pound, Japanese yen, South Korean won and Swiss franc. A subgroup of 28 financial institutions and central banks carried out the real-value testing. That is narrower than the project’s broader participation: more than 40 commercial banks and other private institutions are involved in the initiative.
The reported average settlement time describes the trial transactions, not every cross-border payment. The tests also did not directly integrate the platform with core real-time gross settlement systems, which central banks use to settle payments. Those boundaries matter when assessing what the results show: Agorá has demonstrated settlement in defined scenarios, but the supplied findings do not establish that the architecture is operating as a general replacement for existing payment networks.
On May 27, 2026, before the real-value tests concluded, the BIS and IIF published a 97-page findings report confirming the technical feasibility of atomic settlement and legal finality across the participating jurisdictions. Atomic settlement means the linked parts of a transaction settle together, rather than leaving one part completed while another remains outstanding. Legal finality concerns whether a completed settlement is recognized as final under the applicable legal framework.
How the two-layer design works
Agorá separates two forms of money in its architecture. Tokenized central bank reserves are held on jurisdictional ledgers, while tokenized commercial bank deposits sit on a shared unifying ledger. In this context, tokenization represents existing forms of money on ledgers designed to coordinate transactions; it is not, under the project’s legal assessments, a change in what those reserves or deposits are.
Those assessments found that tokenization under the Agorá architecture does not alter the legal characterization of either central bank reserves or commercial bank deposits in any participating jurisdiction. That distinction is central to the project’s approach: it tests whether banks can coordinate payments using shared digital infrastructure while retaining the established separation between central bank money and commercial bank liabilities.
The platform is also designed to run anti-money laundering, customer due diligence, sanctions and fraud screening simultaneously, rather than passing those checks sequentially across intermediaries. This is an architectural feature of the system, not evidence that compliance checks can be dispensed with. The shared-ledger approach changes how participating institutions coordinate those checks and settlement steps; it does not remove the need for them.
Modernizing an existing model
The original central bank group comprised the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of France representing the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico and the Swiss National Bank. The Bank of Canada has since joined the consortium. Private-sector participants in the broader initiative include JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, UBS, BNP Paribas, CaixaBank and Standard Chartered.
The scale of wholesale payments helps explain the focus. They account for approximately 91% of global cross-border payment value, according to the figures in the research package. The broader cross-border payments market reached $195 trillion in 2024 and is projected to grow to $320 trillion by 2032. Those figures describe the market the project addresses, not a forecast of adoption for Agorá itself.
The central question, therefore, is not whether one shared ledger has made correspondent banking obsolete. Agorá’s design retains central bank and commercial bank money as distinct, legally recognized components while testing whether they can be coordinated more directly for cross-border settlement. The July trials provide evidence from real-value transactions; their defined scope and lack of direct core settlement-system integration limit what can be concluded beyond them.
Ramp partnered with Stripe and Bridge in July 2026 to deploy stablecoin rails for business bill payments and yield-bearing stablecoin accounts funded through standard fiat bank accounts. The arrangement shows how stablecoins can be incorporated into familiar payment workflows without requiring businesses to fund every transaction with digital assets. The economics depend on more than the cost of moving a token on-chain. Stripe charges merchants 1.5% for stablecoin checkout transactions, versus its standard card-processing fee of 2.9% plus $0.30; neither figure establishes the price of Ramp’s bill-payment service. Businesses receiving fiat may also face foreign-exchange and off-ramp costs, typically 0.3% to 2.0% when converting into local banking systems. Domestic clearing networks and compliance checks remain part of end-to-end delivery. Bridge’s issuance and transfer tools, alongside its conditional U.S. trust-bank approval, illustrate the infrastructure behind those payments—but not the elimination of every payment cost.
StraitsX has opened onboarding for digital payment token providers across more than 100 markets through an expanded card-issuing architecture developed with Visa. Integration documentation published on 26 October 2026 describes a multi-BIN model that combines issuing sponsorship, transaction authorization, compliance screening and fiat clearing. The approach lets participating providers build stablecoin-backed card products while merchants continue to receive conventional fiat payments through Visa’s network. StraitsX says its card gross transaction value rose 40-fold year on year from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025, while cards issued across Asia increased 83-fold. On-chain issuer telemetry recorded monthly card transaction volume of $310 million to $438 million through October 2026. The company’s stated $6 billion annualized card transaction figure is distinct from its cumulative $70 billion in processed stablecoin volume. StraitsX and Visa have also scheduled demonstrations of agentic payments for November 2026.
ACI Worldwide and Circle announced a pilot on October 27, 2026, involving USDC and connectivity to Colombia’s Bre-B instant payments system. The integration runs through ACI Connetic, a payments orchestration platform, rather than embedding USDC in Bre-B’s central infrastructure. There is no indication that Colombia’s central bank has adopted USDC as a settlement asset for the national network. The distinction matters because ACI also supplies technology for Bre-B’s central directory and real-time clearing engine. Bre-B launched in October 2025 and handled more than 500 million transactions within five months. Connetic is designed to bring traditional payment rails and digital asset networks together without requiring banks to replace legacy core ledgers. ACI says the platform can support other digital assets and liquidity providers, so the pilot does not make USDC its exclusive option. The arrangement tests a vendor-level connection alongside an established public payment system, not a change to that system’s settlement rules.
Ripple received final approval on 26 October 2026 for Ripple National Trust Bank, giving it a federally chartered institution for fiduciary and custody activities. The charter does not authorize commercial deposits or loans, and it does not transfer issuance of Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin to the new bank. RLUSD issuance remains with Standard Custody & Trust Company under New York State Department of Financial Services supervision. BNY is the primary custodian of the dollar deposits and U.S. Treasury reserves backing the stablecoin. The arrangement separates a federal custody role from state-supervised issuance. It also comes as the OCC implements the GENIUS Act’s stablecoin rules and faces a lawsuit from the Independent Community Bankers of America challenging its authority to grant national trust charters to crypto firms. Ripple has separately announced an expanded partnership with BNY and Robinhood focused on institutional custody capabilities and exploring tokenized trade finance.
Stripe confirmed in October 2026 that it plans to expand its Bridge- and Visa-powered stablecoin card issuing program from 18 initial countries to more than 100 by the end of the year. The planned rollout spans Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Middle East. It follows Stripe’s February 2025 acquisition of Bridge, whose APIs connect stablecoin transfers with fiat accounts and bank payouts. Stripe has also made Open USD available to businesses in Stripe Financial Accounts alongside USDC. Its broader stablecoin infrastructure combines Bridge’s conversion tools with Stripe’s existing payment and treasury network and embedded wallets from Privy. Lead Bank supports the card program as a financial institution partner and BIN sponsor. A separate deployment by Ramp uses Bridge APIs and Privy wallets to let businesses pay vendors in stablecoins using funds from fiat bank accounts. Together, the developments show how Stripe is assembling stablecoin services for business payments, while the planned geographic expansion remains unfinished.
Project Agorá settled approximately CHF 800,000 in live, multi-currency transactions during a July 2026 testing phase. The work examined a cross-border payment model that places tokenised commercial bank deposits on a shared ledger while holding tokenised central bank reserves on jurisdictional ledgers. Five central banks participated directly in live-reserve settlement, although the project’s wider central-bank group has since expanded to eight with the Bank of Canada’s entry. The project reports an average settlement time of 80 seconds across six currencies and uses smart contracts to run anti-money laundering, sanctions and fraud checks simultaneously. Legal analyses found that tokenisation did not change the underlying character of deposits or reserves in participating jurisdictions. The findings support further work on deposit-based wholesale settlement, but the supplied research does not establish that the approach outperforms stablecoins. The Eurosystem plans to draw on Agorá’s architecture for Projects Pontes and Appia.