When a bank settles a tokenised repo, an FX trade or a bond issuance on a distributed ledger, the ledger records who owes what. It does not, on its own, answer a harder question: what asset actually discharges the payment leg. A separate piece on this site set out what a holder is owed when the instrument is a stablecoin, a tokenised deposit or a money market fund share. This one is about the layer those three sit on: central bank money, and whether it can move on the same rails as everything else. As of September 2026, central banks have built real things, but not the same thing, and most of it is still a prototype or a test. The nearest thing to a live service, the ECB's Pontes, is scheduled to switch on later this month.
Two shared platforms, two designs
The two best-known multi-currency projects both came out of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub, and they differ in what goes on the ledger. Project mBridge built a new blockchain, the mBridge Ledger, as a multi-CBDC platform shared among participating central banks and commercial banks, onto which central banks issue wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Project Agorá puts two kinds of money on a shared platform, tokenised central bank reserves and tokenised commercial bank deposits, so that the two-tier structure of today's banking system carries over onto the ledger. The BIS has handed the first over to its partners and remains involved in the second.
Project Agorá: from prototype to real value
Agorá brings together eight central banks and more than 40 financial institutions, convened by the Institute of International Finance in collaboration with the BIS, which first proposed the concept. The prototype phase, reported by the BIS on 27 May 2026, involved seven central banks: the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Banque de France for the Eurosystem, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico and the Swiss National Bank. The Bank of Canada joined afterwards.
The architecture is layered. Commercial banks issue tokenised deposits on a unifying ledger, while each central bank deals only with its own jurisdictional ledger for tokenised reserves. In the BIS's words, the design lets central banks "retain autonomy over national currencies and operations within an interoperable shared platform", while making atomic, all-or-nothing settlement possible across currencies. The BIS reported that settlement finality is achievable in all seven participating jurisdictions, and that further work is needed on technical, operational and contractual requirements.
Real-value testing followed in July 2026. According to the BIS, 28 financial institutions and central banks completed 17 transaction scenarios, with individual values from CHF 9,000 to CHF 125,000 and a total of about CHF 800,000, across six currencies: the Swiss franc, euro, pound, yen, won and US dollar. The average time from payment initiation to settlement was about 80 seconds. The BIS is explicit that the project "is not about building a finished product but rather has delivered a prototype to evaluate the potential". Future work, it says, gives the private sector an enhanced role. There is no announced date for a live service.
mBridge: a minimum viable product, then a handover
mBridge's founding validating nodes were run by the Digital Currency Institute of the People's Bank of China, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Bank of Thailand and the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates; the Saudi Central Bank joined as a full member in 2024. The platform reached minimum viable product stage in mid-2024. In October 2024 the BIS announced it was handing the project over to its partners. Agustín Carstens, then BIS General Manager, called the exit a "graduation", saying the project had matured to the point where the partners could continue on their own, and, as reported at the time, said that "mBridge is not the 'BRICS bridge'" and dismissed suggestions that it was a route around sanctions.
The BIS project page records nothing after the handover. Transaction figures for mBridge circulate in trade press, but this piece does not repeat them, because none of those seen traces back to a central bank or BIS source. What can be said is narrower: mBridge showed a shared multi-CBDC platform working to minimum viable product standard, and it now runs without the BIS.
The ECB's two tracks: Pontes and Appia
The European Central Bank chose a different route: give the market a bridge to central bank money now, and design the longer-term architecture separately. The Governing Council approved this dual-track plan on 1 July 2025, building on exploratory work between May and November 2024 in which 64 participants ran more than 50 trials and experiments.
Pontes, the short-term track, links market DLT platforms to the Eurosystem's TARGET Services so that DLT-based wholesale transactions can settle in central bank money. Participants either settle on a Eurosystem DLT platform using cash tokens or settle in T2, the Eurosystem's real-time gross settlement system; the ECB says final settlement in central bank money occurs once the transaction completes in T2. The July 2025 announcement described a Pontes pilot due by the end of the third quarter of 2026, and the ECB's Pontes page gives the initial launch as that quarter. Ledger Insights reported on 4 August 2026 that the ECB is targeting a production go-live of 21 September 2026, and that institutions wanting to be in the first group had to register with their national central bank by 7 August. That date has not yet arrived: Pontes is scheduled, not live.
Appia is the longer horizon, an analytical initiative rather than a build. The ECB describes it as work towards "a future-ready, innovative and integrated European financial DLT-based ecosystem", organised around six building blocks that include asset interoperability, monetary policy and collateral management on DLT, tokenised central bank money infrastructure and cross-border links. Its stakeholder consultation closed on 22 April 2026, and a blueprint is due in 2028. The principle is stated plainly: the ecosystem must keep "central bank money as the anchor of a two-tier monetary system".
The Bank of England: connect the ledger to RTGS
The Bank of England has concentrated on connecting its existing settlement system to new ledgers. At City Week on 2 July 2025, Sasha Mills, the Bank's Executive Director for Financial Market Infrastructure, said that "central bank money should be the primary settlement asset in the financial system". The speech described work with industry on a synchronisation interface, which would allow funds in RTGS accounts to settle conditionally against assets on external ledgers, including DLT-based ones, as part of the Future Roadmap for the Bank's renewed RTGS system, RT2. It also noted that the Bank now offers omnibus accounts for RTGS participants and was the first central bank to onboard a DLT-based private payments operator, Fnality. The speech did not announce a wholesale CBDC.
Sasha Mills was a panellist at Proof of Talk Paris, at the Louvre Palace, on 3 June 2026, in "Beyond USD: The Future of Euro, Sterling and Swiss Franc Stablecoins" on the Hecto Main Stage, a session moderated by Lisa Cameron, Co-Chair of the UKUS Crypto Alliance.
On 19 May 2026, Sarah Breeden, Deputy Governor for Financial Stability, said the Bank has "a low risk appetite for a significant shift away from settlement in central bank money" as wholesale markets tokenise, while expecting both tokenised deposits and stablecoins to play "an ongoing role in tokenised markets". According to Breeden, the Bank's Synchronisation Lab involves 18 firms testing use cases including house purchases, tokenised securities and foreign exchange, with the service targeted to go live in 2028. That makes it a testing programme with a published participant count and a target year, not yet a live service.
The Federal Reserve: reserves, not a new token
In Washington the case against a new instrument is partly technical. A FEDS Note by Federal Reserve Board staff Jon Durfee, Jesse Leigh Maniff and Priyanka Slattery, published on 8 September 2023 and presenting the authors' own views rather than the Board's, concluded that "a new settlement asset in the form of wCBDC is not essential for these platforms to transfer central bank money", arguing that existing reserves could serve on tokenised platforms. Governor Lisa D. Cook, speaking in Dakar on 8 May 2026, described possible efficiency gains from tokenised money market funds and programmable intraday repo, while saying: "I do not see tokenization as replacing traditional market infrastructure."
The politics point the same way. Executive Order 14178, signed on 23 January 2025 and in force, sets a policy of "prohibiting the establishment, issuance, circulation, and use of a CBDC within the jurisdiction of the United States", and, except where the law requires otherwise, bars agencies from any action to establish, issue or promote CBDCs. It defines a CBDC as digital money that is a direct liability of the central bank, without a separate category for wholesale use. The House passed the standalone Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act on 17 July 2025 by 219 votes to 210; as of late August 2026 it had not become law. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York was nonetheless one of the seven central banks in Agorá's prototype phase, as the BIS reported in May 2026.
Singapore: a live trial, then a plan
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has taken a domestic wholesale CBDC further than the projects above. In November 2025 DBS, OCBC and UOB completed a live trial settling interbank overnight lending in Singapore dollar wholesale CBDC. According to a Central Banking report of 13 November 2025, MAS Managing Director Chia Der Jiun said MAS planned to issue tokenised bills to primary dealers, settled in that wholesale CBDC, in 2026. This piece has not confirmed that the issuance has taken place.
The disagreement that remains
Two questions run through all of this. The first is whether central bank money needs a native token at all. Pontes offers cash tokens on a Eurosystem ledger, Appia lists tokenised central bank money infrastructure among its building blocks, MAS has used a wholesale CBDC in a live trial, and Agorá tokenises reserves on jurisdictional ledgers. The Bank of England's synchronisation interface and the Fed staff note take a different line: conventional reserves, settled conditionally against an external ledger, can do the job without a new form of central bank money. The gap is narrower than it looks, since even in Pontes final settlement happens in T2.
The second question is how much of the settling private money should do, and this is where tokenised deposits and wholesale CBDC genuinely compete. None of these programmes shuts commercial bank money out. Agorá is built on tokenised deposits settling against tokenised reserves, and Breeden expects tokenised deposits and stablecoins to keep a role. The open question is proportion: how far settlement can move into private tokenised money before it becomes what Breeden called a significant shift away from central bank money. Evidence has not yet settled it, because Pontes has not processed a production transaction and the Synchronisation Lab's live date is 2028.
For a treasurer or general counsel, the practical point is that the cash leg of a tokenised trade may settle differently in Frankfurt, London and Singapore by the end of the decade, even though the ECB and the Bank of England both say central bank money should stay the anchor. That is a separate problem from moving the asset itself, which this site's piece on tokenised collateral and market infrastructure covers. None of this is legal, accounting or investment advice.