TD Tests Real US-Dollar Tokenized Payments With BNY in Project Agorá
BNY supported the dollar-clearing arrangement. The BIS project’s real-value testing remains a controlled wholesale prototype.
TD says it has completed testing of tokenized payments using actual US dollars through Project Agorá, working with BNY as a clearing and intermediary bank. The August 31 announcement describes transfers between TD entities in the United States as part of the Bank for International Settlements project.
Using real money moves the exercise beyond a demonstration funded entirely with simulated balances. It still represents controlled testing, rather than the launch of a generally available cross-border payment network. TD announcement.
Tokenized deposits meet central bank settlement
Project Agorá examines how tokenized commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves can work together on a shared platform. The design connects the money a bank owes its customer with the central bank money used to settle between participating banks.
The BIS reports that July 2026 real-value testing involved 28 financial institutions alongside central banks. Across 17 scenarios, the exercise processed 30 transactions totaling about CHF800,000 equivalent. Individual payments ranged from approximately CHF9,000 to CHF125,000, with an average of about 80 seconds from initiation to settlement. These are project-level results, not figures for TD alone. BIS Project Agorá.
The project tested conditional settlement, including payment-versus-payment arrangements in which linked currency transfers complete together. The attraction for banks is the ability to coordinate obligations within one transaction process rather than managing each leg as an entirely separate event.
A real-dollar test still has boundaries
The BIS describes predefined intraday testing windows and dependencies outside the prototype, including manual processes. The exercise therefore does not demonstrate unattended, around-the-clock production service.
Those boundaries matter when evaluating an average completion time. A result from scheduled testing says something useful about what the prototype achieved under those conditions. It cannot establish the service levels a customer would receive across different currencies, time zones and operating conditions. BIS testing results.
TD’s own announcement places BNY within the dollar clearing and intermediary arrangement. That is a practical reminder that tokenized payments must connect to institutions responsible for moving and settling the underlying money. TD.
The operational work beyond a successful transfer
For a bank considering this model, a completed payment is one part of the assessment. Treasury teams also need to understand how liquidity reaches the platform, how balances are reconciled and how an interrupted transaction is resolved.
Conditional settlement can reduce the risk of one linked payment completing while another fails. Its usefulness in daily operations depends on reliable funding and exception handling around that mechanism.
The next stage of evidence should therefore address operating arrangements as well as transfer speed: who runs the service, when funds are available, how participants handle failures and which obligations are final under the relevant rules. The real-value exercise gives those questions a more concrete starting point.