Overview
- The Bank of Korea, which took part in live Project Agora trials on Thursday, confirmed the prototype’s core functions and business processes ran stably during multi-currency settlement tests.
- Participants including about 28 institutions processed roughly 800,000 Swiss francs across 17 payment scenarios that used six currencies and demonstrated atomic settlement mechanics.
- For a domestic test the BOK issued, transferred, and redeemed 20 million won in tokenized reserves by manually linking its Project Hangang ledger to the Agora platform to validate interoperability.
- KB Kookmin Bank completed a yen-denominated deposit-token payment test with Japan’s MUFG Bank, making it the first South Korean commercial bank to finish an overseas deposit-token trial.
- The exercise showed prototype-level interoperability using ISO 20022 messaging and average settlement times near 80 seconds, but firms and central banks said they need automated RTGS/core-banking integration, further scenario testing, and regulatory and security reviews before any production rollout.