BBVA Participates in the Validation of Project Agorá’s Tokenized Cross-border Payments Model

Agorá has demonstrated the potential of blockchain and programmable technologies to improve the efficiency of international corporate payments while preserving the safety and integrity of the transactions. BBVA is participating in the project along with central banks and more than 40 international financial institutions. The project has validated the feasibility of conducting settlements across currencies and jurisdictions using tokenized central bank reserves and tokenized commercial bank deposits. In upcoming phases it will advance to real-value testing.

Project Agorá, a unique public-private collaboration convened by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Institute of International Finance (IIF), has demonstrated that blockchain technology can help address some of the traditional inefficiencies in wholesale cross-border payments in a safe and secure manner. The project, involving seven central banks along with BBVA and over 40 international financial institutions, has published a report detailing the findings of this exploratory work. The report confirms the technical and legal feasibility of advancing toward these new cross-border settlement models.

The project has shown that so-called atomic settlement — enabling transactions to be executed on an ‘all-or-nothing’ basis, meaning that a transaction is only completed if all parties involved can settle simultaneously — can take place securely across currencies and jurisdictions. To make this possible, the project validated an interoperable layered architecture that allows central banks to retain autonomy over national currencies and transactions within a shared platform.

The tests also show that the privacy of both account balances and transactions can be safeguarded through technologies that protect sensitive information while supporting regulatory compliance. In addition, this new model does not alter the legal nature or the obligations associated with central bank reserves or commercial bank deposits.

In parallel, the tests confirmed that the final settlement of balances can be completed across the currencies of the seven participating currency areas (Eurozone, United States, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Mexico, Japan and Korea), although technical, operational and contractual requirements will need to be adapted to each national framework.

“With Project Agorá, we have demonstrated that it is possible to use blockchain-based technologies to rethink how cross-border payments are executed, using tokenized deposits to improve and streamline execution while maintaining the highest regulatory and operational safeguards through settlement in central bank money,” said Francisco Maroto, Head of Blockchain and Digital Assets at BBVA.

In Mexico, BBVA was actively involved in analyzing the legal, regulatory, operational and governance dimensions of tokenized money, including the finality of the settlement prototype. In this regard, Hugo Nájera Alva, Head of Retail Banking at BBVA Mexico, said: “The project has proven to be a successful collaboration model between central banks and financial institutions. It is based on a shared and interoperable infrastructure, with the main goal of improving and addressing existing challenges in the movement of international funds.”

The prototype also paves the way for new capabilities, including conditional and always-on payments, as well as future enhancements in areas such as anti-money laundering, sanctions compliance and fraud detection, as regulatory and data-sharing frameworks evolve.

Project participants will continue exploring the potential benefits of the prototype, moving toward real-value transactions along with financial institutions.