BIS Project Guardian & Mariana — Central Bank Tokenization Experiments

BIS Innovation Hub: Central Bank Tokenization Experiments

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub operates the most consequential central bank tokenization experiments globally. Project Guardian — a collaboration between BIS Innovation Hub Singapore, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), and financial industry participants — tested institutional asset tokenization including tokenized bonds, foreign exchange, and fund products. Project Mariana explored DeFi-inspired automated market makers for central bank FX trading. Project Agorá brought together seven central banks to explore tokenized cross-border payments.

Project Guardian

Project Guardian, launched in 2022, directly tested the capital markets tokenization thesis with 40+ financial institutions including Ant Group, Apollo, DBS, Franklin Templeton, Hamilton Lane, OCBC, UBS Group, JPMorgan, and Standard Chartered. Phase 1 included three industry pilots: (1) JPMorgan, DBS Bank, and SBI Digital Asset Holdings tested institutional-grade DeFi protocols for tokenized bonds and deposits — executing live transactions involving tokenized Singapore government securities, Japanese government bonds, and currency (JPY and SGD); (2) Standard Chartered and Linklogis tested tokenized trade finance assets on public blockchain; (3) HSBC, UOB, and Marketnode tested tokenized wealth management products.

MAS published an operational framework for tokenized funds proposing a spectrum from “Digital Mirror” to advanced models. IMAS (Singapore) and UK Investment Association joined Project Guardian in August 2025 — the first asset management industry groups to participate. MAS also established a partnership with Deutsche Bundesbank for cross-border digital asset settlements. In 2026, MAS plans a tokenized government bills pilot settled using wholesale CBDC, with trial banks including DBS, JPMorgan, and Standard Chartered, building on a successful 2025 trial. A separate ISDA/Ant International report examined the use of tokenized bank liabilities for FX settlement and cross-border payments under Project Guardian.

Phase 2 expanded to additional asset classes and explored institutional-grade automated market makers for tokenized fixed-income products. The MAS tested a liquidity pool for tokenized government bonds with compliance-aware pricing — essentially a regulated AMM designed for institutional bond trading. This experiment directly addresses the secondary market liquidity challenge for tokenized bonds.

Project Mariana

Project Mariana — a collaboration between BIS Innovation Hub, Banque de France, MAS, and Swiss National Bank — tested automated market makers (AMMs) for wholesale foreign exchange trading using hypothetical CBDCs. The project demonstrated that AMM-based FX trading between central banks is technically feasible, with the AMM algorithm providing continuous liquidity and pricing for euro-franc-SGD trading pairs.

The implications for capital markets tokenization are significant: if central banks validate AMM technology for FX, the same AMM designs could apply to tokenized bond markets, tokenized equity markets, and other institutional asset classes. The institutional AMM — with KYC verification, compliance checks, and central bank oversight — could solve the liquidity formation problem that currently limits tokenized security markets.

Project Agorá

Project Agorá, announced in 2024, brings together the central banks of France, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Federal Reserve Bank of New York) to explore how tokenization can improve cross-border payments. While primarily focused on payments rather than securities, Agorá’s infrastructure — connecting tokenized commercial bank deposits and central bank money across jurisdictions — directly enables cross-border settlement of tokenized securities.

BIS Unified Ledger Vision

The BIS’s “Finternet” concept and unified ledger vision — articulated in the 2023 Annual Economic Report — envisions a tokenized financial infrastructure where central bank money, commercial bank deposits, and tokenized securities coexist on shared programmable platforms. This vision, if realized, would enable atomic multi-leg settlement connecting bond issuance, equity trading, and payment in a single transaction.

For the institutional infrastructure ecosystem, BIS experiments validate that central banks view tokenization as a legitimate evolution of financial market infrastructure rather than a competitive threat to existing systems. Canton Network, SWIFT, and DTCC all participate in or align with BIS-led initiatives, ensuring compatibility between institutional infrastructure development and central bank policy direction.

Project Guardian Phase 2: Institutional Fixed-Income Liquidity

Project Guardian Phase 2 expanded the scope of institutional asset tokenization experiments significantly. The fixed-income workstream tested institutional-grade automated market makers (AMMs) for tokenized government bonds — a direct attempt to address the secondary market liquidity bottleneck that constrains tokenized bond adoption. The MAS-supervised AMM incorporated compliance-aware pricing (only KYC-verified participants could access the pool), dynamic spread adjustment based on market conditions, and regulatory reporting integration.

The foreign exchange workstream tested tokenized FX spot and forward transactions between institutional counterparties, with smart contract-enforced settlement eliminating the Herstatt risk (the risk that one party to an FX transaction delivers currency while the counterparty defaults before delivering the other currency). For the $7.5 trillion daily FX market, eliminating Herstatt risk through atomic settlement would reduce systemic risk and free collateral currently held against FX settlement exposure.

The wealth management workstream explored tokenized structured products and fund distribution, testing whether blockchain-based distribution channels could reach qualified investors across APAC jurisdictions. HSBC, UOB, and Marketnode tested tokenized wealth management products with cross-border distribution, demonstrating that a tokenized fund issued in Singapore could be distributed to investors in Hong Kong and Australia through smart contract-enforced transfer restrictions that verify investor eligibility by jurisdiction.

Project Agorá: Tokenized Payments Infrastructure

Project Agorá — the most ambitious BIS Innovation Hub project by central bank participation count — brings together seven central banks (France, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, UK, US) to test tokenized cross-border payments. The project’s architecture uses a “unified ledger” design where tokenized commercial bank deposits and central bank money coexist on a shared platform, enabling programmable cross-border payments with atomic settlement.

For capital markets tokenization, Agorá’s significance lies in the payment leg of securities settlement. Tokenized bond settlement requires both a securities leg (the token transfer) and a cash leg (payment). If the cash leg uses traditional correspondent banking, settlement cannot be truly atomic — the securities transfer completes on-chain while the cash transfer processes through the multi-day correspondent banking chain. Agorá’s tokenized payment infrastructure could provide the instant cash settlement leg that enables true atomic DvP for cross-border tokenized bond and equity transactions.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s participation in Agorá — the first U.S. central bank involvement in a BIS tokenized payments project — signals that the world’s reserve currency issuer is actively exploring tokenized payment infrastructure. For the $2.4 quadrillion in annual DTCC settlement, a tokenized cash leg would fundamentally change the settlement risk profile.

BIS Annual Economic Report: The Finternet Vision

The BIS’s 2023 Annual Economic Report introduced the “Finternet” concept — a vision of interconnected financial networks where tokenized assets, deposits, and central bank money flow seamlessly across platforms and jurisdictions. The 2024 report expanded this vision with specific implementation guidance, advocating for “unified ledgers” operated by regulated entities under central bank oversight.

The Finternet architecture has three layers. The foundation layer consists of tokenized central bank money (wholesale CBDCs) providing risk-free settlement. The intermediate layer consists of tokenized commercial bank deposits (deposit tokens) providing programmable commercial money. The application layer consists of tokenized securities (bonds, equities, private assets) that settle using the deposit and CBDC tokens on the lower layers.

This layered architecture aligns with the approach taken by JPMorgan (JPM Coin as the deposit token layer), Goldman Sachs GS DAP (tokenized securities on the application layer), and Broadridge DLR (tokenized repo connecting the securities and money layers). The BIS vision essentially validates the infrastructure that institutional participants are already building.

Cross-Project Synergies and Integration

The BIS Innovation Hub operates 15+ projects across its centers in Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, London, Stockholm, and Toronto. While Project Guardian, Mariana, and Agorá are the most directly relevant to capital markets tokenization, several other projects provide supporting infrastructure:

Project Helvetia (Swiss National Bank, SIX) tested wholesale CBDC settlement for tokenized securities on SIX Digital Exchange — directly enabling central bank digital bond settlement in Switzerland. Phase 3 conducted live transactions settling tokenized bonds with wholesale CBDC.

Project mBridge (HKMA, Bank of Thailand, PBOC Digital Currency Research Institute, Central Bank of UAE) tested multi-CBDC cross-border payments. For sovereign digital bonds traded cross-border between APAC jurisdictions, mBridge provides the payment infrastructure for atomic cross-border settlement.

Project Jura (Banque de France, Swiss National Bank, BIS) tested cross-border settlement of tokenized assets (French commercial paper) against wholesale CBDC (Swiss franc) between two separate national DLT platforms. This experiment directly demonstrated cross-border tokenized securities settlement with central bank money finality.

The convergence of these projects creates an increasingly complete infrastructure picture — tokenized securities (Guardian), tokenized payments (Agorá, mBridge), wholesale CBDC settlement (Helvetia, Jura), and institutional DeFi protocols (Mariana) — that collectively validate the capital markets tokenization thesis at the central bank level.

Industry Participant Insights

The institutional participants in BIS projects — JPMorgan, DBS Bank, Standard Chartered, HSBC, UOB, SBI Digital Asset Holdings — have publicly reported learnings that inform the broader tokenization market. JPMorgan’s participation in Project Guardian Phase 1 demonstrated that institutional DeFi protocols can execute live transactions with real value transfer, not just simulations. DBS Bank’s participation validated that Asian banks can interoperate with global platforms for cross-border tokenized asset transactions.

These learnings feed directly into commercial product development. JPMorgan’s Onyx/Kinexys platform incorporates insights from Project Guardian into its production tokenized repo and payment systems. HSBC Orion applies wealth management tokenization learnings from Guardian Phase 2 to its commercial digital bond platform. The BIS projects serve as a pre-competitive sandbox where institutional participants can test approaches before committing to commercial deployment.

Policy Implications and Recommendations

The BIS has translated project findings into policy recommendations that shape the G20 tokenization roadmap and national regulatory frameworks. Key recommendations include:

Central banks should develop wholesale CBDC infrastructure that can serve as the settlement asset for tokenized securities — eliminating the dependency on commercial bank money for atomic DvP settlement. The regulatory compliance framework for tokenized securities should follow the “same activity, same risk, same regulation” principle, applying existing securities regulation rather than creating new crypto-specific frameworks.

Interoperability between tokenized platforms should be achieved through standardized protocols rather than bilateral integrations, with the BIS advocating for the Canton Network and SWIFT linking approaches over proprietary bridges. The smart contract risk framework should include formal verification requirements for high-value tokenized securities, with the DAML language providing a reference implementation.

According to BIS research, the combined findings from Project Guardian, Mariana, Agorá, and supporting projects demonstrate that “tokenization of financial assets is technically feasible at institutional scale, with clear benefits for settlement efficiency, transparency, and cross-border interoperability.” The BIS estimates that full implementation of the tokenized financial infrastructure vision could reduce global settlement costs by $20-30 billion annually and free $500 billion+ in collateral currently tied up in settlement risk mitigation.

The tokenized bond market forecast directly incorporates BIS project milestones as key inputs — the base case scenario assumes that BIS-validated infrastructure (wholesale CBDC settlement, institutional AMMs, cross-border interoperability) reaches production readiness by 2027-2028, while the conservative scenario assumes delays to 2029-2030.

Production Scale Validation and Institutional Impact

The institutional impact of BIS tokenization projects extends beyond experimental findings to production-scale validation. DTCC, settling $2.4 quadrillion annually, has incorporated BIS project learnings into its tokenized settlement roadmap. Broadridge DLR’s $385 billion average daily tokenized repo volume and JPMorgan Onyx’s $2 trillion+ in processed transactions (per IOSCO November 2025 report) demonstrate that the institutional infrastructure validated through BIS projects operates at commercial scale. The total RWA tokenization market at $20 billion in TVL (excluding stablecoins) with 630,000+ holders reflects the cumulative institutional adoption catalyzed by BIS project credibility — central bank endorsement through participation in Guardian, Mariana, and mBridge provides the institutional legitimacy that risk-averse allocators require before committing to tokenized assets. Fnality International — backed by 15 global banks including multiple BIS project participants — is commercializing the wholesale payment infrastructure tested in BIS cross-border settlement experiments. HQLAx, which processed EUR 100 billion+ in DLT-based collateral transfers, builds on collateral management concepts validated through BIS experiments. According to World Bank analysis, BIS tokenization projects provide “the empirical foundation for global policy coordination on digital asset infrastructure,” with the G20 tokenization roadmap directly incorporating BIS project timelines into its milestone framework.

Goldman Sachs GS DAP and HSBC Orion — both participants in BIS Project Guardian — have directly incorporated experimental findings into their commercial platforms, accelerating the transition from pilot to production for institutional tokenized asset transactions. Canton Network interoperability — connecting 75+ institutional participants — operationalizes the cross-platform connectivity concept validated through BIS experiments, enabling the institutional DeFi workflows tested in Guardian to function across production-grade infrastructure. SWIFT messaging integration with BIS project participants ensures that the 11,500+ SWIFT member institutions can access tokenized asset markets validated through BIS experiments without deploying direct blockchain connectivity. According to IOSCO analysis of BIS project outcomes, the experimental evidence from Guardian, Mariana, and related projects provides “sufficient confidence for regulators to advance production-stage regulatory frameworks” for institutional tokenized securities markets.

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