The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has successfully moved its tokenized payment experiment, Project Agorá, from simulation to real-value transactions. According to BIS reports, the initiative has now entered a phase where participants plan to test tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits using real currencies and institutions. The project, which launched in April 2024, has evolved from a design phase that began in 2025 to active testing that started in January 2026. The BIS described this as the point where the initiative moved past concept work and into something closer to an operating system.
Project Agorá demonstrates how tokenized central bank money and bank deposits can complete cross-border payments in a single atomic step across currencies. As reported by the BIS, this represents a significant improvement over current systems where cross-border transfers can pass through multiple intermediary banks, stretching settlement to days and adding operational risk during reconciliation. The project involves more than 40 private institutions and seven central banks, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and the Swiss National Bank. The BIS noted that participating central banks include the Bank of Canada, which joined the initiative during the same week as the operational milestone announcement.
Citi's new report Tokenization 2030: Wall Street On-Chain reveals that the tokenized securities market is poised for explosive growth, with the global market expected to surge from just $17 billion today to $5.5 trillion by 2030. According to Citi's base forecast, the market could range from a low end estimate of $2.7 trillion to a bullish forecast of $8.2 trillion, depending on adoption speed. The report identifies three key drivers: major market infrastructures embedding tokenization into core trading systems, the rise of trusted digital cash, and clearer U.S. government regulations. DTCC announced it will start limited production trades of tokenized securities in July 2026, with a broader launch planned for October, while Nasdaq is working on a framework for blockchain-based shares with potential launch as early as 2027.
Citi projects that stablecoins alone will generate demand for up to $1 trillion worth of onchain U.S. Treasury bills and $2.6 trillion for tokenized stocks by 2030. The report expects standard stablecoins to grow to $1.9 trillion market by 2030, working alongside digital bank deposits to enable instant asset and cash swaps. Citi assumes that 10% of the U.S. Treasury bill market and 3% of the U.S. public stock market will be tokenized by 2030, with just 10% of everyday U.S. investors switching to digital platforms creating $2.6 trillion in demand for digital stocks. However, the growth will be gradual, with Citi comparing the transition to how highways adopted electronic toll tags - states built wider roads with parallel lanes for both cash and automated systems before full automation.
Despite promoting tokenization research, the BIS has maintained a cautious stance toward privately issued crypto instruments amid mounting security concerns. As reported by the BIS, the organization has warned that stablecoins could create risks for the financial system and has urged faster progress on stablecoin regulation. The latest developments show DeFi has lost over $1 billion to exploits in 2026, with April being the worst month for crypto hacks in history by incident count. OpenZeppelin's co-founder Manuel Aráoz posted that he now considers 'all of DeFi' unsafe, citing that coding agents are superhuman at finding vulnerabilities while smart contract security is too asymmetric. The crisis reached new heights when Stake DAO was exploited after an attacker compromised the protocol's deployer private key, enabling unbounded minting of 5.4 trillion tokens with a nominal value of $763 billion, though thin DEX liquidity limited actual extraction to approximately $91,000.
