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.

HSBC launched its Hong Kong dollar-backed stablecoin, RedCoin, on PayMe on October 23, 2026, beginning a phased rollout for person-to-person and merchant payments. PayMe has 3.3 million existing accounts, but that figure is not the number of RedCoin users: customers must opt in to activate a stablecoin wallet as access becomes available. Issued by The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited under a Hong Kong Monetary Authority stablecoin licence, RedCoin is pegged one-to-one to the Hong Kong dollar and backed by segregated liquid reserves. It runs on HSBC’s permissioned distributed-ledger network, and PayMe balances will not be transferable to stablecoin wallets in HSBC’s main mobile banking app. HSBC plans to add wallets to that app before the end of 2026, enabling instant settlement for tokenized money market fund investments starting at HK$100. Later phases are intended to extend RedCoin to corporate and institutional settlement.