The Bank of Korea has completed live cross-border payment trials using tokenized central bank reserves through the Bank for International Settlements' Project Agora. The tests processed transactions involving six currencies and included various international payment scenarios.
Live Testing Across Multiple Currencies and Banks
South Korea’s central bank teamed up with commercial banks such as KB Kookmin, NongHyup, Shinhan, Woori, and Hana for these trials. They managed around 800,000 Swiss francs across 17 different payment cases, covering currencies including the Korean won, US dollar, euro, British pound, Swiss franc, and Japanese yen.
Among the scenarios tested were single and dual-currency settlements, payment-versus-payment foreign exchange operations, and transfers within the same financial group. The Bank of Korea also executed a domestic transfer of 20 million won in tokenized reserves between NongHyup Bank and Shinhan Bank, receiving payment instructions from both parties and handling issuance, transfer, and redemption on the Project Agora platform.
Testing System Interoperability and Future Plans
The trial linked the Bank of Korea's wholesale CBDC platform, Project Hangang, with its existing financial network through a manual connection, checking interoperability as part of the process. The Bank of Korea participated alongside 27 other central banks and financial institutions in this recent round of testing, validating Project Agora's robustness under real-world-like conditions.
The central bank is preparing for further tests to cover additional payment scenarios and transaction types, continuing its exploration of tokenized reserve usage in cross-border payments.
This material is for informational purposes and does not constitute financial advice.
