How synchronised settlement, tokenised money and programmable infrastructure could change the way financial markets exchange value—and why “atomic” does not mean “risk-free”.
The attraction of atomic settlement is simple: if two obligations are meant to exchange, either both complete or neither does. That sounds like a technical refinement. In wholesale finance, it is potentially a structural change. Today, many securities, foreign-exchange and cross-border transactions still rely on separate systems, separate ledgers and carefully sequenced movements of cash and assets. The gap between those movements is where settlement risk lives.
The latest experiments suggest the idea is moving beyond theory. In May 2026, the Bank for International Settlements said Project Agorá had demonstrated atomic multi-currency settlement using tokenised central bank reserves and tokenised commercial bank deposits, and that the work would advance to real-value testing. BIS Project Agorá Meanwhile, Project Meridian and Meridian FX have shown that synchronisation can link existing real-time gross settlement systems and other ledgers without requiring every asset to live on one blockchain. BIS Project Meridian FX
Why settlement risk exists in the first place
Financial transactions frequently have two or more legs. A securities trade has an asset leg and a cash leg. A foreign-exchange trade has one currency leg and another. A cross-border payment may involve correspondent banks, liquidity providers and multiple domestic payment systems. The safest design is to make those legs conditional on one another.
Traditional market infrastructure has already reduced this risk substantially through delivery-versus-payment (DvP) in securities and payment-versus-payment (PvP) in foreign exchange. But coverage is incomplete, operating hours do not always overlap, and many arrangements depend on intermediaries or prefunding. The result is residual principal risk, liquidity risk and operational risk.
The BIS has continued to measure the scale of the problem. Its 2026 work using the 2025 Triennial Survey described FX settlement risk as a continuing concern even after decades of infrastructure improvements. Atomic settlement is therefore best understood as the next attempt to compress the time and dependency between obligations—not as the first attempt to solve settlement risk.
BIS: Uncovering FX settlement risk
What “atomic” actually means
In computer science, an atomic operation is indivisible: it succeeds as a whole or fails as a whole. Applied to finance, the concept means that linked transfers are executed as a single coordinated state change. If the conditions are not met, neither leg should settle.
There are two broad architectures. The first puts cash and assets on the same programmable platform. The second synchronises separate infrastructures so that a transaction on one system is conditional on a transaction on another. Both can achieve economically similar outcomes, but they create different governance, technology and legal questions.
| Model | Core idea | Potential advantage | Main constraint |
| Single programmable platform | Cash and asset/payment legs share one coordinated ledger or platform | Native programmability; direct conditional settlement | Migration, governance and common-rulebook complexity |
| Synchronisation across systems | A coordinator links transactions on existing RTGS, securities or DLT systems | Can preserve existing infrastructure while reducing sequencing risk | Requires robust interoperability, legal certainty and failure handling |
Project Meridian: atomicity without putting everything on one ledger
Project Meridian, led by the BIS Innovation Hub London Centre and the Bank of England, tested a synchronisation operator that coordinated transfers between the UK real-time gross settlement system and an asset ledger. The key insight was architectural: settlement can be made conditional across systems. A central coordinator can reserve cash, verify the asset transfer and complete both legs only when the required conditions are satisfied.
Meridian FX extended the concept to foreign exchange. The 2025 project, involving the BIS Innovation Hub, Bank of England, Banque de France, Deutsche Bundesbank, Banca d’Italia and the European Central Bank, showed that wholesale payment infrastructures can be linked for synchronised FX settlement. The project also demonstrated that the approach can work with ISO 20022 messaging and can remain agnostic to the technology of the underlying ledgers. Project Meridian overview
Project Agorá: atomic cross-border settlement on a tokenised foundation
Project Agorá is more ambitious because it addresses the monetary architecture itself. The prototype combines tokenised central bank reserves with tokenised commercial bank deposits and supports programmable workflows for wholesale cross-border payments. According to the BIS, the prototype can complete multi-currency transactions atomically, with all necessary transfers succeeding together rather than being processed sequentially through a chain of correspondent accounts.
That matters because cross-border payments are not merely a messaging problem. They combine compliance checks, liquidity management, foreign-exchange conversion, account relationships and final settlement. Tokenisation can potentially place these steps inside a coordinated workflow, so that approvals and conditions are resolved before the final transfer happens.
The evidence is promising but still experimental. The May 2026 announcement explicitly framed the next phase as real-value testing, not production deployment. That distinction matters. Demonstrating atomic settlement in a controlled prototype is different from operating at global-bank scale under stress, across jurisdictions and around the clock. BIS press release on Agorá real-value testing
Central bank money is becoming part of the design
Atomic settlement only solves part of the trust problem if the settlement asset itself is questionable. That is why central banks have focused heavily on how tokenised transactions can settle in central bank money. Project Helvetia demonstrated both a wholesale CBDC model and a model that linked a DLT platform to an existing real-time gross settlement system. The Eurosystem has also tested DLT-based wholesale transactions settling in central bank money through interoperability solutions.
The Eurosystem’s 2024 exploratory work included trials with actual transactions recorded on DLT and settled in central bank money in production environments. In February 2025, the ECB decided to expand the initiative, subsequently developing its Pontes and Appia tracks for DLT settlement. ECB exploratory work
Atomic does not mean risk-free
The most important counterargument is semantic. Atomic settlement can remove or sharply reduce the risk that one leg settles while another does not. It does not eliminate credit risk before settlement, liquidity risk, operational outages, cyber risk, legal uncertainty or the possibility that a smart contract encodes the wrong condition.
There is also a liquidity trade-off. Netting allows institutions to offset many obligations and settle only the balance. Gross atomic settlement can reduce counterparty exposure but may require more intraday liquidity because each transaction must be funded when it settles. A market can therefore become safer from one kind of risk while becoming more demanding from a liquidity-management perspective.
The legal question is equally important. A technical state change is not automatically legal finality. Jurisdictions need clear rules governing when settlement becomes irrevocable, how insolvency law treats tokenised claims, which ledger is authoritative when systems disagree, and how transactions can be unwound after fraud or operational error. Atomicity can coordinate execution; law still determines enforceability.
The strategic implications for banks and market infrastructure
For banks, the immediate opportunity is not the disappearance of settlement operations but their redesign. Treasury functions may need to manage liquidity continuously rather than around traditional cut-off times. Operations teams may shift from reconciliation after the fact toward monitoring conditions before execution. Correspondent banking relationships could become thinner in some corridors if tokenised platforms directly coordinate regulated bank money across jurisdictions.
For central securities depositories, RTGS operators, card and payment networks, and messaging providers, the question is whether atomic settlement becomes a new layer that connects existing infrastructure or a replacement for parts of it. The Meridian model supports the first interpretation. Agorá explores something closer to a shared programmable platform. The likely outcome may be plural: some markets will adopt tokenised ledgers while others will use synchronisation to make legacy infrastructure behave more atomically.
For fintechs, the value may lie in orchestration—identity, compliance logic, smart-contract controls, liquidity routing and interoperability rather than in creating an entirely new settlement asset. For regulators, the task will be to ensure that faster and more automated settlement does not create opaque dependencies or concentrated technology risk.
A more realistic endpoint: less settlement risk, not the end of risk
The phrase “the end of settlement risk” is useful precisely because it forces a distinction. Atomic settlement can attack one of finance’s oldest structural weaknesses: the interval between obligations that are economically linked but operationally separate. The experiments now under way show that this can be done both through tokenised shared platforms and through synchronisation across existing systems.
But the strongest case for atomic payments is not that they make finance risk-free. It is that they can move risk to places where it is easier to see and manage. Principal risk can fall. Reconciliation can shrink. Conditional logic can be automated. In return, liquidity, interoperability, legal and technology governance become more important.
That is still a profound shift. If financial markets can reliably make “all legs or none” the default for more transactions, settlement could become less about managing the consequences of timing gaps and more about designing the conditions under which value is allowed to move at all.
References
1. BIS — Project Agorá: a shared programmable platform for wholesale cross-border payments
2. BIS — Project Agorá press release: work advances to real-value testing
3. BIS — Project Meridian FX: exploring synchronised settlement in FX
4. BIS — Project Meridian: innovating transactions with synchronisation
6. ECB — Exploratory work on new technologies for wholesale central bank money settlement
7. BIS — Uncovering FX settlement risk: new measures from the 2025 Triennial Survey
8. BIS Annual Economic Report 2026 — Anchoring trust in money: innovation beyond stablecoins
