The European Central Bank is about to let trades recorded on distributed ledgers settle in central bank money. Speaking at a Deutsche Bundesbank symposium on the future of payments on August 26, 2026, ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone confirmed that the Eurosystem will go live with Pontes this year. ECB documentation puts the launch in the third quarter of 2026, and Ledger Insights has reported a September 21, 2026, go-live.
Pontes does not tokenize securities; private platforms already do that. It handles the cash leg. Until now, a tokenized security traded on a private ledger settled in commercial bank money or in a private token, so the settlement asset carried issuer risk. Pontes replaces that asset with central bank euros.
Hash-Link ties the securities leg to the cash leg
Pontes connects market DLT platforms to the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services. The two sides are synchronized through a protocol called Hash-Link, which guarantees all-or-nothing settlement: the securities are delivered and the cash is paid together, or neither happens. That is textbook delivery versus payment, applied to a trade whose two legs sit on two different infrastructures.
Participants can settle in one of two ways: on the Eurosystem’s DLT platform using cash tokens, or in T2, the Eurosystem’s real-time gross settlement system. The T2 option is the more important one. A bank does not need to hold a new asset to take part, only the T2 access it already has.
- Participants: any entity with access to T2 within the meaning of Article 4 of Annex I, Part I of the TARGET Guideline.
- Platforms that can connect: authorized central securities depositories, operators of DLT settlement systems under the DLT Pilot Regime, supervised operators of payment systems in the European Union and the European Economic Area, and authorized central counterparties.
- Transactions: delivery versus payment and, more broadly, any transaction that requires both legs to settle simultaneously.
- Pricing at launch: one-off onboarding fees only, with no recurring charges in the initial phase, to remove a barrier to adoption.
The service moves to 24/7 by mid-2028
Europe’s post-trade market remains split by depository
Cipollone’s speech put numbers on the urgency in Frankfurt. Worldwide, tokenized traditional assets recorded on public blockchains grew roughly fivefold in a year, from €4.7 billion in March 2025 to €23.3 billion in March 2026. The market is still small next to conventional holdings, but its growth curve is that of infrastructure still taking shape, which is when standards get locked in.
| Type of infrastructure | Number in the EU |
|---|---|
| Central securities depositories | 31 |
| Central counterparties | 14 |
| Trading venues | 323 |
| Share of 2023 transactions settled within a single depository | more than 95% |
The last row says the most. When more than 95% of transactions, by volume and by value, never leave a single depository, post-trade is not a single market. It is a set of national markets connected by costly links. Tokenization can recreate that map on ledgers or bypass it. Pontes is designed to bypass it.
Cipollone names three risks and three conditions
Cipollone flagged three risks. The first is fragmentation: incompatible platforms that scatter liquidity across ledgers unable to talk to each other. The second is the loss of the monetary anchor, if settlement shifts permanently to private assets. The third is external dependence, if the infrastructure and technology European finance runs on are designed and operated outside Europe. To avoid them, he set three conditions:
- Interoperability based on common standards and rules, so that separate systems can exchange reliable instructions without altering the identity of an asset or its issuer’s controls.
- A public-private partnership to drive adoption, with the authorities providing the monetary anchor and the prudential framework, and the market providing the assets and services.
- An integrated legal framework that settles, across the EU, who owns a tokenized asset, when settlement becomes final, how custody works, and whether smart contracts are enforceable.
Appia, the ECB’s second track, is not a piece of software. It is a roadmap that brings public and private players together on the architecture, standards and governance of tokenized finance in Europe, from asset interoperability to collateral management. Its blueprint is due in 2028.
For payments professionals, the near-term impact is indirect: a securities settlement system does not change how a merchant gets paid. But Pontes sets a European precedent on a question that will return in payments: which asset a trade finally settles in, and who carries the risk on it.