Project Agorá Concludes With Central Banks on Blockchain Rails: Where Does That Leave XRP and XLM?
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Key Takeaways
The BIS-led initiative, Project Agorá, showed that tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits can settle cross-border payments instantly on shared blockchain rails.
Agorá demonstrated that major institutions can achieve atomic multi-currency settlement without relying on independent crypto assets like XRP.
Ripple is expanding into stablecoins, tokenization, and institutional infrastructure, while Stellar remains focused on remittances and underserved markets.
Large wholesale payment corridors may shift toward central-bank-backed systems, but emerging markets, retail remittances, and liquidity routing still leave room for crypto-native networks.
For over a decade, Ripple and Stellar have built their entire value propositions around a single, demonstrable failure in the global financial system: cross-border payments are slow, expensive, opaque, and structurally dependent on a chain of correspondent banks that extract fees at every link.
XRP and XLM each offered a version of the same answer, a blockchain-native bridge asset that could settle international transfers in seconds at near-zero cost, without requiring a trusted intermediary at the center.
On May 27, 2026, the Bank for International Settlements disclosed that Project Agorá, a two-year experiment involving seven central banks, the Institute of International Finance, and more than 40 private financial institutions, including JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, BBVA, Visa, and Mastercard, had been concluded.
The project delivered a prototype demonstrating that tokenized commercial bank deposits can be successfully combined with the trust and safety of tokenized central bank reserves on a shared platform, enabling atomic multi-currency settlement of wholesale cross-border payments around the clock.
— Bank for International Settlements (@BIS_org) May 27, 2026
That conclusion does not make XRP or XLM obsolete. What it does is force a cleaner, more honest assessment of where each token’s use case actually holds, and where central bank infrastructure is now moving to cover the same ground.
What Project Agorá Built and How Settlement Works
Understanding what Agorá proved requires understanding what actually makes cross-border payments slow today.
The current cross-border payment system suffers from slow transfer speeds, high costs, and limited transparency due to its structure of routing through multiple intermediaries.
Agorá examined how to address these inefficiencies by tokenizing central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits and processing them on a common distributed ledger platform.
Project Agorá shows how tokenisation could modernise global wholesale payments. | Source: @BIS_org on X.
The project implemented a structure that processes AML checks, financial sanctions screening, and fraud detection in parallel, then locks the funds just before settlement to complete transactions within seconds.
Atomic settlement is cited as a core technology of the project. By applying an all-or-nothing structure in which every step in the transaction chain is executed or canceled simultaneously, the system minimizes settlement risk while enabling 24-hour round-the-clock operations.
By leveraging smart contracts, the shared platform allows financial institutions to embed workflow logic, compliance requirements, and conditional payment triggers directly into transactions, reducing reconciliation burdens, manual intervention, and operational frictions that are key sources of delay and cost in today’s cross-border system.
Seven central banks participated: the Banque de France, representing the Eurosystem; the Bank of Japan; the Bank of Korea; the Bank of Mexico; the Swiss National Bank; the Bank of England; and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Settlement across all seven currency areas was confirmed in testing.
The New York Fed, Bank of England, and Bank of Japan now plan to move from simulations to testing real-value transactions.
That step from prototype to live capital marks the transition from proof-of-concept work to infrastructure with genuine deployment implications.
XRP’s Thesis: Validated in Theory, Complicated in Practice
Ripple spent years arguing that blockchain-native atomic settlement was the correct architecture for cross-border payments. Project Agorá agreed with that diagnosis and built exactly what Ripple described, except using tokenized central bank reserves rather than XRP as the settlement asset.
SWIFT moved its blockchain-based shared ledger to MVP status on March 30, 2026, enabling 24/7 cross-border payments through tokenized commercial bank deposits, eliminating weekend delays, while deliberately avoiding public cryptocurrencies like XRP.
Agorá’s conclusion builds on that development, reinforcing a pattern: institutional infrastructure is moving to blockchain rails, doing so by tokenizing existing regulated money rather than routing through independent crypto assets.
That creates a genuine challenge for XRP’s bridge asset narrative at the wholesale institutional level. The bridge asset use case exists specifically because there is no direct settlement path between two currencies. Agora’s shared ledger creates a direct multi-currency settlement path using tokenized reserves, thereby removing one of the core conditions that made a neutral bridge asset necessary.
The company spent over $2.7 billion on acquisitions in 2025, including prime broker Hidden Road and stablecoin payments platform Rail, building institutional infrastructure that does not depend solely on XRP as a bridge currency.
The XRPL crossed $2 billion in tokenized assets in January 2026, with Société Générale launching its euro stablecoin on the ledger in February 2026, Ondo Finance bringing tokenized US Treasuries to XRPL via RLUSD redemption mechanisms, and an $800 million energy tokenization project in Argentina settling on XRPL in April 2026.
Notably, XRP functions as a bridge asset for liquidity and interoperability while RLUSD acts as a unit of account and settlement currency, a division of labor that makes more sense in a world where central bank tokenization is moving to cover direct institutional settlement corridors, leaving the liquidity routing function for illiquid currency pairs and emerging market corridors to a neutral bridge asset.
The honest version of XRP’s position post-Agorá is this: wholesale settlement between major reserve currency pairs may increasingly move to central bank-managed shared ledgers.
Cross-border payments involving illiquid corridors, markets without central bank tokenization infrastructure, and retail remittance flows remain a territory where XRP’s speed and liquidity depth offer genuine value that no Project Agorá prototype currently covers.
Project Agorá is explicitly a wholesale payments project. Its focus is on wholesale cross-border transactions between major financial institutions across reserve currency jurisdictions.
Retail remittances, microfinance corridors, and payments to unbanked populations in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, or Southeast Asia are entirely outside its scope.
Central banks moving to tokenized reserve settlement in USD, EUR, JPY, and GBP corridors does not directly address the Bangladesh-to-Philippines remittance corridor or the small-business payment flows between African markets that Stellar targets.
That structural distinction gives Stellar a different kind of exposure.
Its immediate competitive threat comes less from Agorá than fromSWIFT’s expanding blockchain framework, which is now moving into retail payment corridors, including Australia-Bangladesh and India-Pakistan, routes that are core to XLM’s remittance thesis.
Stellar’s bigger risk may emerge over the longer term. If central bank tokenization expands beyond wholesale settlement into retail payments and remittance infrastructure, as several BIS papers have suggested, XLM’s differentiation could narrow significantly.
At the same time, the Stellar Development Foundation has been positioning the network as complementary to CBDCs rather than a direct competitor.
That strategy gained further momentum after the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) and the Stellar Development Foundation announced plans to enable the tokenization of DTC-custodied assets on the Stellar network, with launch targets set for the first half of 2027.
DTCC and the Stellar Development Foundation announced today plans to enable the tokenization of DTC‑custodied assets on the @StellarOrg network. This collaboration advances DTCC’s multi chain strategy and expands how traditional assets move across digital ecosystems.… pic.twitter.com/bdeX0JmDGY
The partnership aligns with DTCC’s broader multi-chain strategy and strengthens Stellar’s positioning within institutional tokenization infrastructure.
What Coexistence Actually Looks Like
Cross-border payment flows are projected to grow from roughly $190 trillion in 2023 to nearly $290 trillion by 2030, with business-to-business transfers accounting for the largest share. No single infrastructure will carry all of that volume.
A Project Agorá-type solution could support a range of use cases beyond wholesale cross-border payments, including tokenized assets and capital markets transactions.
That ambition is real, but the path from a seven-currency prototype to global deployment across all payment corridors involves years of technical, legal, and interoperability work that remains entirely unfinished.
SWIFT, Agorá, RLUSD, XRP, and XLM are not converging on a single winner. They are each carving out portions of a market too large and too fragmented for any one architecture to dominate.
What Project Agorá’s conclusion does change is the competitive framing: the institutional wholesale corridor that XRP once targeted as its primary opportunity now has a central-bank-backed alternative in active development.
That shifts Ripple’s differentiation toward tokenization infrastructure, stablecoin settlement, and emerging-market liquidity, areas where the company has spent 3 years and billions of dollars building a position that Agorá’s prototype does not replicate.
The pressure is real. The displacement is not immediate.
Project Agorá is a BIS-led experiment involving major central banks and private financial institutions testing tokenized cross-border payment infrastructure.
Does Project Agorá replace XRP and XLM?
The project challenges XRP’s wholesale settlement narrative, but XRP and XLM may still play roles in remittances, emerging markets, and liquidity routing.
Why is Agorá important for global payments?
The project showed that tokenized reserves and deposits can support atomic, 24/7 cross-border settlement with lower friction and fewer intermediaries.
Which central banks participated in Project Agorá?
Participants included the Bank of England, Bank of Japan, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Swiss National Bank, Banque de France, Bank of Korea, and Bank of Mexico.
Disclaimer:
The information provided in this article is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be, nor should it be construed as, financial advice. We do not make any warranties regarding the completeness, reliability, or accuracy of this information. All investments involve risk, and past performance does not guarantee future results. We recommend consulting a financial advisor before making any investment decisions.
Dr. Guneet Kaur is a senior editor at CCN.com and a Science Fellow at Exponential Science. She is a fintech and blockchain expert with extensive experience in digital finance education, blockchain ecosystems, and cryptocurrency markets. She has worked with global media such as Cointelegraph, as well as education and blockchain platforms, to design and lead strategic content and learning initiatives. As an educator and assessor for top-tier executive programs, she bridges real-world fintech trends with academic insight.
Dr. Kaur is also a published researcher and peer reviewer across fintech and data science journals, including Financial Innovation Journal and International Journal of Big Data Intelligence and Applications. Her work spans data-driven analysis, Web3 innovation, and technical content development. With a strong foundation in both industry and academia, she translates complex financial technologies into practical applications, empowering learners, professionals, and institutions across the rapidly evolving digital finance landscape.
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