Bank of Canada Joins BIS Project Agorá on Tokenized Cross-Border Payments

The Bank of Canada has joined Project Agorá, an international initiative examining how tokenization could improve wholesale cross-border payments.

The project is led by the Bank for International Settlements and the Institute of International Finance. It is designed to test whether tokenized commercial bank deposits and wholesale central bank money can be used on a multi-currency unified ledger to make international payments faster, more efficient, more transparent and more accessible.

According to the research record, Project Agorá has demonstrated the feasibility of atomic settlement on such a ledger. Atomic settlement refers to transactions structured so that payment and related transfers settle together, reducing the risk that one leg of a transaction is completed while another is not.

The Bank of Canada’s participation places it among the central banks and financial-sector institutions exploring whether tokenized forms of money can modernize the infrastructure behind wholesale international payments.