JPMorgan, Citi, UBS and 25 other public and private institutions completed Project Agorá’s tokenized payment trials, processing approximately CHF 800,000 across six currencies.
The testing involved 30 transactions across 17 scenarios using Swiss francs, euros, British pounds, Japanese yen, South Korean won and US dollars.
The trials covered corporate and interbank payments, intragroup transfers, dual currency transactions and payment versus payment settlement.
Project Agorá used tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits representing real monetary value. Transactions were settled atomically, meaning the assets involved were transferred simultaneously or not at all.
Despite the prototype not being directly integrated with existing real time gross settlement and core banking systems, transactions took an average of approximately 80 seconds from initiation to settlement.
Participants also gained full visibility into payment status and routing, while corporate payments could be processed directly through the platform.
The testing showed that the prototype could interact with external banking infrastructure using established ISO 20022 payment and reporting standards, including pacs.008, pacs.009 and camt.053 messages.
Participating institutions included BNY, BNP Paribas, CaixaBank, Deutsche Bank, Lloyds Banking Group, Mizuho, MUFG, NatWest, Standard Chartered and TD Bank.
The Bank of England, Bank of France, Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea and Swiss National Bank also participated. SIX coordinated the transactions, while blockchain infrastructure provider Kaleido operated the testing platform.
Around 250 employees across payments, compliance, risk, legal and technology teams took part in the exercise.
The results demonstrated that tokenization and atomic settlement could accelerate cross border payments, improve transparency and operate alongside banking systems across multiple jurisdictions.