Project Agorá

• Twenty-eight private sector institutions and central banks completed transactions totalling approximately CHF 800,000 in a selection of currencies during real-value testing (RVT). The programme covered 17 transaction scenarios, with values ranging from CHF 9,000 to CHF 125,000 or local currency equivalents.
• The testing demonstrated that the prototype can successfully support a broad range of cross-border payment use cases, including corporate and interbank single- and dual-currency payments, payment-versus-payment (PvP) transactions, and intragroup bank transfers.
• RVT demonstrated the practical benefits of tokenisation and atomic settlement, including faster settlement and greater transparency. Despite the prototype not being integrated with existing real-time gross settlement (RTGS) and core banking systems, the average time from payment initiation to settlement was approximately 80 seconds. Participants also valued the end-to-end visibility of payment status and routing as well as the ability to support corporate payment processing directly on the platform.
• The prototype was designed to interoperate with diverse external systems across jurisdictions, and RVT demonstrated the feasibility of this approach. Test transactions interacted with RTGS and core banking systems using established ISO 20022 payment and reporting standards, including pacs.008, pacs.009 and camt.053.
• Approximately 250 public and private sector staff members participated in the testing. The exercise enhanced operational readiness across payments, compliance, risk and legal teams, helping institutions to assess the organisational implications of adopting a Project Agorá-like platform in the future.

RVT demonstrated the feasibility of conducting real-value transactions on the Project Agorá platform under realistic operating conditions. In the testing, issued tokens represented real monetary value, representing central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits.

The testing covered a selection of currencies, payment use cases and transaction scenarios (Table 1). The participating financial institutions and central banks conducted the testing on behalf of all Project Agorá participants.

Testing in the RVT environment incorporated central banks' RTGS systems and participants' core banking systems (Figure 1). Interactions with the RVT environment were facilitated through user interfaces within each participant's Project Agorá prototype software stack (suite). Public and private sector participants adopted different operational approaches, demonstrating the prototype platform's flexibility to accommodate a range of user requirements.

Central banks used their Project Agorá suites to issue and redeem tokenised reserves and to monitor settlement on the jurisdictional ledger. The suites in Figure 1 illustrate that central banks interacted with the jurisdictional ledger only (blue suites). The issuance of tokenised reserves was triggered outside the RVT environment, typically following a payment from the requesting financial institution to a dedicated RTGS account (eg an escrow or omnibus account). Redemptions were initiated by the financial institutions through the RVT environment and subsequently settled in the RTGS system by crediting the institution's reserve account.

Financial institutions used their Project Agorá suites to issue and redeem tokenised deposits, manage tokenised reserve holdings, submit payments and monitor account balances and transaction activity on the platform. Depending on their business activity and transaction scenarios, financial institutions issued tokenised deposits in one or several currencies on the unifying ledger and managed tokenised reserves in one or several jurisdictional ledgers. The suites in Figure 1 reflect the varying approaches. Some of the entities issued tokenised deposits and managed tokenised reserves (orange and blue suites), others managed tokenised deposits only (orange suites). To issue tokenised deposits, financial institutions earmarked the corresponding funds or booked the equivalent amount to a designated account in the core banking system. The redemption process reversed these steps.

Figure 1: stylised real-value testing (RVT) setup

All transactions were coordinated by SIX in its role as the RVT operational facilitator during predefined, intraday transaction windows using a detailed runbook. Kaleido supported transaction execution as the technology provider. A typical RVT transaction began with the issuance of tokenised reserves and deposits. Debtors, debtor agents (for corporate transactions) or the initiation service provider (for PvP transactions) initiated payments by preparing payment instructions in accordance with established ISO 20022 standards (pacs.008 or pacs.009). Payment instructions were submitted once the participating financial institutions had completed compliance checks and, for dual-currency transactions, the cross-currency provider manually confirmed the corresponding amount. This triggered the locking of funds and the subsequent atomic settlement.

Following settlement, creditors or their agents requested the redemption of the tokens. Once the token issuer approved the redemption request, the corresponding funds were transferred through the underlying external systems. Selected transaction scenarios also included the execution of offsetting transactions prior to redemption.

The testing framework covered governance, legal, operational and technical aspects. It was based on a contractual agreement between testing institutions, complemented by a runbook and fallback procedures (Table 2) as well as a dedicated RVT environment for the execution of transactions (Table 3).