On 26 August 2026, at the Bundesbank symposium on the future of payments, Piero Cipollone, a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, confirmed that Pontes will go into service. This Eurosystem component settles in central bank money a transaction whose securities move on a distributed ledger. The ECB documentation sets the launch in the third quarter of 2026, and Ledger Insights puts it on 21 September 2026.
The question here is not the tokenisation of securities, which private platforms already handle. It is the cash leg of the trade. Until now, a tokenised security traded on a private ledger settled in commercial money or in a private token, so the settlement asset carried an issuer risk. Pontes replaces that asset with central bank euro.
What Pontes actually does
Pontes links market DLT platforms to the TARGET Services. The synchronisation runs on a protocol called Hash-Link, which guarantees an all-or-nothing settlement: the delivery of the securities and the payment complete together, or neither of them completes. That is the classic definition of delivery versus payment, transposed to a case where the two legs live on two different infrastructures.
Two arrangements sit side by side. The participant settles either on the Eurosystem DLT platform with cash tokens, or in T2, the real-time gross settlement system. The second option matters more. It means that a bank does not have to hold a new asset in order to take part, only the access to T2 that it already has.
- Who can be a participant: any entity with access to T2 within the meaning of Article 4 of the TARGET Guideline.
- Which platforms can connect: authorised central securities depositories, operators of DLT settlement systems under the pilot regime, supervised operators of payment systems in the European Union and the European Economic Area, and authorised central counterparties.
- Which operations: delivery versus payment and, more broadly, any transaction that requires both legs to settle at the same moment.
- What it costs at launch: a one-off entry fee, with no recurring charge in the initial phase, to remove a barrier to adoption.
A timetable in three steps
European fragmentation, in figures
The speech by Piero Cipollone supplied the orders of magnitude that explain the urgency felt in Frankfurt. Traditional assets tokenised on public blockchains grew roughly fivefold worldwide in a year, from 4.7 billion euros in March 2025 to 23.3 billion in March 2026. The market stays small next to conventional outstandings, but its slope is that of an infrastructure in the process of settling into place, and therefore of choosing its standards.
| Type of infrastructure | Number in the Union |
|---|---|
| Central securities depositories | 31 |
| Central counterparties | 14 |
| Trading venues | 323 |
| Share of 2023 transactions settled inside a single depository | more than 95% |
That last line is the telling one. A post-trade infrastructure in which more than 95% of transactions never cross the boundary of a depository is not a single market. It is a stack of national markets joined by expensive bridges. Tokenisation can reproduce that geography on ledgers, or it can route around it. Pontes aims at the second outcome.
Three risks, three conditions
Piero Cipollone named three dangers. The first is the fragmentation of platforms, which scatters liquidity across ledgers that do not talk to each other. The second is the loss of the monetary anchor, if settlement migrates for good towards private assets. The third is external dependence, if the infrastructures and the technologies used by European finance are designed and operated outside Europe.
- Common interoperability standards, so that separate systems can exchange reliable instructions without altering the identity of the asset or the controls its issuer applies.
- Coordination between the public and the private sector, with the authority supplying the monetary anchor and the prudential framework, and the market supplying the assets and the services.
- An integrated legal framework, clarifying across the Union who owns a tokenised asset, when settlement becomes final, how custody works and whether smart contracts are enforceable.
Appia, the second strand announced, produces no software. It is a roadmap that brings public and private players together on the architecture, the standards and the governance of European tokenised finance, from the interoperability of assets to the management of collateral. The deliverable is due in 2028.
For payments professionals, the immediate reach stays indirect. A securities settlement infrastructure does not change the way a merchant collects a payment. It does set the European precedent on a question that will come back in payments, namely which asset counts at the moment of settlement, and who carries the risk on it.