TD Completes First Real-USD Tokenised Payment on Project Agorá Platform With BNY as Clearing Intermediary
TD Completes First Real-USD Tokenised Payment on Project Agorá Platform With BNY as Clearing Intermediary #
TD Bank Group completed its first live tokenised payment on the Project Agorá platform on August 31, 2026, moving real U.S. dollar funds between two domestic TD entities using distributed ledger technology.
The transaction settled between TD New York Branch (TD Securities LLC) and TD Bank, N.A., with Bank of New York Mellon (BNY) acting as clearing bank and settlement intermediary. It was conducted as part of Project Agorá’s real-value testing programme, which has included payments across multiple currencies and scenarios involving participating central banks and financial institutions.
Project Agorá is a public-private initiative co-convened by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Institute of International Finance (IIF). The project is testing whether tokenised commercial bank deposits and tokenised central bank reserves can run on shared programmable infrastructure to speed up and reduce the cost of wholesale cross-border payments, with regulated banks and central banks retaining their established roles.
The test used atomic settlement, in which the transfer of assets between parties occurs simultaneously rather than in staggered steps, removing the lag and counterparty risk common in conventional settlement. TD said the result demonstrated the platform’s ability to issue tokenised money and move it instantly between institutional entities, and described it as evidence of the platform’s viability for real-money transactions.
TD said the transaction supports the case for faster, more transparent, and more cost-efficient wholesale cross-border payments without altering the structure of the existing banking system. The bank said it plans to continue working with public- and private-sector partners as the industry evaluates how tokenisation, programmable settlement, and shared infrastructure might affect global payment systems.
The announcement follows a July BIS report showing that real-value testing of cross-border tokenised payments produced an average settlement time of about 80 seconds from payment initiation, compared with typical correspondent banking timelines. More than 40 regulated financial institutions are participating in Project Agorá.
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