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The European Central Bank is done talking about tokenisation in the abstract. Piero Cipollone, a member of the ECB’s Executive Board, has outlined a concrete timeline for building a tokenised financial market infrastructure across Europe, anchored by the Pontes project launching in Q3 2026 and a broader ecosystem roadmap called Appia targeting completion by 2028.
The Pontes project and the plumbing underneath
At the core of Cipollone’s vision is Pontes, a project designed to connect market-facing distributed ledger technology platforms directly to TARGET Services, the Eurosystem’s existing settlement infrastructure. The practical effect: DLT-based transactions could settle in tokenised central bank money rather than relying on commercial bank deposits or stablecoins.
In 2024, the Eurosystem ran DLT trials that processed roughly €1.6 billion in transactions across nine jurisdictions. Those trials served as a proof of concept, demonstrating that central bank money settlement on DLT platforms is technically feasible at meaningful scale.
Pontes takes that from pilot to production. Its September 2026 launch date is ambitious by central bank standards.
Appia: the road to 2028
Published on March 11, 2026, the Appia roadmap is the Eurosystem’s blueprint for an integrated tokenised financial ecosystem. It covers the full stack of what needs to happen for tokenised finance to work at scale: interoperability between platforms, legal frameworks, collateral eligibility, and the coordination required between public and private actors.
One milestone has already landed. As of March 2026, DLT-issued marketable assets became eligible as collateral for Eurosystem credit operations. That means banks can pledge tokenised bonds to the ECB in exchange for liquidity, just as they do with traditional securities.
European issuers have introduced close to €4 billion in DLT-based fixed-income instruments since 2021. Cipollone’s argument is that without coordinated public infrastructure, this organic growth risks creating a patchwork of incompatible platforms, each country or market building its own DLT silo, settling in different assets, governed by different rules.
Why monetary sovereignty is the real stakes
Cipollone has been unusually direct about what happens if Europe gets this wrong. Without a common risk-free settlement asset for DLT transactions, the vacuum gets filled by private alternatives: stablecoins, commercial bank tokens, or settlement networks controlled by non-European entities.
Cipollone has consistently advocated for regulatory changes that would put tokenised central bank money on equal footing with its analog equivalent. The concept of atomic settlement, where the exchange of assets and payment happens simultaneously in a single transaction, is central to the pitch. Traditional securities settlement involves multiple intermediaries and typically takes one to two business days. Atomic settlement on DLT eliminates counterparty risk during that window and reduces the operational complexity of reconciliation across systems.
What to watch from here
The Pontes launch in Q3 2026 will be the first real test. If it delivers smooth settlement in tokenised central bank money across multiple DLT platforms, it validates the entire approach. If it stumbles, the 2028 timeline gets harder to defend.
If tokenised central bank money becomes the default settlement rail for European DLT markets, it narrows the use case for euro-denominated stablecoins in institutional finance. Europe’s €4 billion in DLT-based bond issuance since 2021 is a rounding error compared to the continent’s total fixed-income market, but once collateral eligibility and legal certainty are locked in, the pace of tokenised issuance could look very different by 2028 than it does today.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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