In atomic settlement, delivery and payment are bound into one transaction. When a tokenised bond and a stablecoin or deposit token sit on the same ledger, a smart contract can swap them in one step: the buyer cannot receive the bond without paying, and the seller cannot receive the cash without delivering. Counterparty risk during settlement disappears.
The trade-off is finality. Conventional markets settle a day or more after the trade, and that gap is when operations staff, risk teams and counterparties catch errors, reverse fraud and stop a runaway algorithm. Atomic settlement removes that window. A mistaken or manipulated instruction is final the moment it executes.
That makes preventive controls essential. Transfer limits, time delays on large movements, pause functions and agent mandates have to sit inside the code or the authorisation layer, because there is no later stage in which to apply them. The BIS Project Agorá tests of 2026 settled cross-border payments this way in about 80 seconds.