Lloyds Banking Group has completed three live tokenised deposit transactions under Project Agorá’s Real-Value Testing programme, marking a step beyond prototype demonstrations toward transactions that carry actual settlement risk and value.
The three transactions covered sterling, euro and Swiss franc scenarios. The most technically significant was a cross-currency trade in which Lloyds’ Corporate Markets business converted Swiss francs into sterling, with FX conversion, payment and settlement executed as a single linked flow rather than as sequential steps across separate systems. In the two remaining transactions, Lloyds participated as a customer bank, using tokenised deposits in franc and euro payment flows.
Peter Left, Head of Digital and Markets Innovation at Lloyds Banking Group, said: “This testing has allowed us to bring together our payments, settlement and foreign exchange capabilities in a cross-currency transaction. It gives us valuable practical insight into how tokenisation could help reduce friction and settlement risk in wholesale payments, while operating within the regulated banking system.”
What Project Agorá is testing
Project Agorá is a public-private collaboration convened by the Bank for International Settlements and the Institute of International Finance. It brings together eight central banks and more than 40 private-sector financial institutions to explore whether tokenised central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits can operate on a shared programmable platform. One of its central hypotheses is that atomic settlement, where all legs of a transaction complete simultaneously or not at all, is achievable across currencies and jurisdictions. Lloyds’ cross-currency transaction is a live illustration of that principle in practice.
The distinction matters commercially. Cross-border wholesale payments today typically involve a chain of correspondent banks, multiple nostro accounts and asynchronous settlement legs. Each handoff introduces counterparty risk, liquidity drag and operational latency. Linking conversion and settlement into a single atomic transaction reduces the window in which one party has delivered funds but the other has not, a risk that has been a structural feature of FX settlement since at least the 1970s and which the Basel Committee’s guidance on settlement risk explicitly addresses.
Regulatory and competitive context
Lloyds is one of several UK clearing banks that have positioned themselves at the front of the tokenised-money conversation. The group previously worked with Aberdeen Investments and Archax on the use of tokenised money market fund units and tokenised gilts as FX collateral, and completed what it describes as the UK’s first public blockchain transaction using tokenised deposits earlier in 2026. Those earlier milestones were also firsts in a technical sense; the move to real-value testing is the more commercially legible signal.
The Bank of England‘s work on a wholesale digital pound and the ongoing exploration of a retail central bank digital currency provide the regulatory backdrop. The BIS’s involvement in Project Agorá gives the initiative significant institutional credibility and distinguishes it from bilateral proof-of-concept experiments. For competing institutions, the question is now whether the infrastructure emerging from projects like Agorá will become a shared utility or whether early movers will retain a durable advantage through proprietary integration and client relationships built during the testing phase.
The next substantive markers to watch are whether Project Agorá publishes a consolidated technical report on the Real-Value Testing phase, which central banks formalise their participation with committed timelines, and whether the shared programmable platform moves toward a production specification or remains in exploratory status.
The post Lloyds Completes Live Tokenised Deposit Transactions Via Project Agorá appeared first on The Fintech Times.