The BIS unified ledger

The BIS Annual Economic Report 2023 describes a new type of financial market infrastructure, a common venue where money and other tokenized claims come together. Its parts are tokenized central bank money for final settlement, tokenized deposits issued by commercial banks, and tokenized securities and other assets. Programmability turns them into executable objects, and composability lets several steps run as one transaction.

The BIS stresses that it does not mean one ledger for everything. Several ledgers for different uses could exist and connect. The point is that payment and asset sit on the same platform, so a trade and its payment can settle at the same moment, which today needs separate systems and reconciliation.

Project Agorá is the test. Central banks, among them the Banque de France for the Eurosystem, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea and the Swiss National Bank, worked with more than 40 financial institutions convened by the Institute of International Finance. Deutsche Bank took part. The BIS published its report on the prototype in May 2026.

The prototype showed that tokenized deposits and tokenized central bank reserves can work together on one platform with atomic settlement across currencies. In real-value tests the BIS reports about 800,000 Swiss francs in 30 transactions across six currencies, with an average of about 80 seconds from initiation to settlement. Resilience, throughput and links to existing settlement systems were not tested, and live operation is the next step.

The unified ledger keeps the two-tier system: central banks provide settlement money, commercial banks issue deposits and serve customers. The BIS 2025 report puts it at the center of a next-generation system in which singleness of money is kept and stablecoins have a secondary role at most.

In the euro area the Eurosystem is building related links under its Pontes and Appia plans for settling tokenized assets in central bank money, covered on wholesale CBDC. For banks the work is in legal settlement finality and the link to their own core systems, see settlement finality.

A unified ledger is a shared programmable platform, proposed by the BIS, on which tokenized central bank money, tokenized deposits and tokenized assets settle together. It allows a payment and the asset it pays for to settle in one step.

The BIS describes a programmable ledger run by regulated institutions that can use distributed ledger technology. It is not a public blockchain, and the BIS does not foresee a single ledger for all uses.

Agorá tested whether tokenized commercial bank deposits and tokenized central bank reserves can settle cross-border payments atomically on one platform. The prototype worked in real-value tests across six currencies.