Led by the Bank for International Settlements, 28 banks—including JPMorgan Chase, and others—are testing cross-border payments using tokenized funds as part of a pilot program.

In a pilot project led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) called “Project Agorá,” 28 commercial banks—including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and UBS—collaborated with five central banks to complete a test of real-world cross-border payments using tokenized funds.The test processed transactions with a real value of approximately $1 million (800,000 Swiss francs) involving six currencies: the U.S. dollar, the euro, the British pound, the Japanese yen, the Swiss franc, and the South Korean won.The pilot utilized tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits settled on a shared ledger, with an average settlement time of approximately 80 seconds, and was designed to explore how digital currencies can modernize the banking sector’s international funds transfer infrastructure.