JPMorgan and Other Banks Successfully Test Tokenized Cross-Border Payments with an Average Settlement Time of 80 Seconds
JPMorgan, Citigroup, UBS, and other major banks, along with various institutions, successfully completed a test of tokenized cross-border payments in the Project Agorá pilot led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
28 commercial banks and several central banks used tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits to process approximately $1 million in real value transactions (covering six currencies: USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, CHF, KRW), achieving an average settlement time of about 80 seconds, enabling atomic settlement and enhancing traceability.
Traditional cross-border payments typically take 1-5 business days. This test demonstrates that tokenized shared ledgers can significantly reduce time and counterparty risk, prompting global banks to accelerate the exploration of tokenized deposits and central bank digital currencies in cross-border scenarios.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
The BIS Project Agorá brings together multiple central banks and 28 commercial banks including JPMorgan, Citigroup, and UBS. After previous proof of concept, it has now entered the real value testing phase, focusing on the atomic settlement capabilities of tokenized deposits and central bank reserves on shared ledgers.
On the capital and infrastructure path, banks operate in parallel with permissioned chains and existing payment systems, motivated to compress the time and risk costs of cross-border payments to seconds without disrupting the existing clearing system, while paving the way for larger-scale tokenized asset flows in the future.
In comparison to SWIFT gpi's acceleration attempts and various banks' own tokenized deposit projects (such as JPM Coin and Citi Token Services), the current phase is transitioning from "single bank pilots to multilateral shared ledgers."
Essentially, this represents a technological substitution and restructuring of the industry chain: as cross-border payments shift from a multi-layer agent model to shared ledger atomic settlement, intermediary steps and time windows are compressed, and pricing power shifts from traditional communication and clearing networks to programmable tokenized infrastructure.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
- 80-second settlement is killing traditional correspondent banks.
- Atomic settlement is the ultimate goal of cross-border payments.
- Shared ledgers go further than unilateral innovations.