ECB highlights tokenisation progress in cross-border payments
Tokenised reserves and deposits enabled safer and more efficient cross-border settlement while preserving financial stability within regulated systems.
Project Agorá, led by the Bank for International Settlements and the Institute of International Finance, has demonstrated how tokenisation and programmable technologies could help address long-standing inefficiencies in wholesale cross-border payments.
Using a dedicated prototype, the project executed atomic settlement across multiple currencies and jurisdictions, allowing cross-border transactions to settle simultaneously and indivisibly.
The project used tokenised central bank reserves and tokenised commercial bank deposits as settlement assets within a tokenised ecosystem. According to the European Central Bank, the findings show that the safety and integrity of wholesale cross-border payments can be preserved while modernising settlement infrastructure.
The Eurosystem, comprising the ECB and the central banks of the 21 euro area countries, participates in Project Agorá, which the BIS and the IIF run with leading central banks and more than 40 financial institutions. The next phase of the project will focus on real value testing.
Insights from the project will support the Eurosystem’s Appia and Pontes initiatives, both designed to strengthen Europe’s tokenised financial ecosystem. Pontes is expected to link market distributed ledger technology platforms with TARGET Services by September 2026, while Appia will outline the longer-term vision for a European tokenised financial ecosystem.
The ECB said the initiatives form part of a unified strategy to foster innovation, strengthen cross-border financial integration, and bolster Europe’s financial sovereignty.
Why does it matter?
Project Agorá shows how central banks and financial institutions are testing tokenisation to modernise cross-border payments without moving outside regulated financial infrastructure. For Europe, the link to Pontes and Appia is especially important because it connects global experimentation with the Eurosystem’s own plans for DLT settlement, TARGET Services, financial integration, and financial sovereignty.
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