The European Central Bank is moving its tokenised settlement work from experimentation towards live financial infrastructure, preparing a Eurosystem service that will connect distributed-ledger platforms with central-bank money. Pontes will link private DLT market platforms to TARGET Services so that the cash leg of tokenised transactions can settle through central-bank infrastructure.

Piero Cipollone, a member of the ECB’s executive board, set out the next phase as the central bank tries to prevent Europe’s emerging tokenised markets from becoming another collection of disconnected private systems. Pontes is designed to synchronise transactions so that asset and cash transfers can settle on a delivery-versus-payment basis.

The initial service is intended to go live this year, with earlier Eurosystem material pointing to September 2026. The ECB then plans to extend operating hours and introduce direct settlement finality through Eurosystem distributed-ledger infrastructure as the service matures.

By the middle of 2028, the central bank is aiming for 24/7 availability alongside greater programmability, stronger resilience, and multi-currency capabilities. That would move Pontes well beyond a bridge into existing settlement rails, although the ECB is deliberately developing the service in stages so operational experience can shape the longer-term architecture.

Tokenisation is leaving the pilot phase

Banks, exchanges, central securities depositories, and public institutions have spent several years testing whether bonds, deposits, collateral, and other financial assets can be issued and moved using distributed ledgers. During 2024, the Eurosystem worked with 64 market participants on more than 50 trials and experiments designed partly to establish whether central-bank money could settle transactions executed on DLT platforms.

Activity remains small beside conventional capital markets, but growth is becoming more visible. The ECB estimates that traditional assets tokenised on public blockchains rose from €4.7 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2025 to €23.3 billion a year later.

Europe’s existing financial infrastructure explains some of the urgency. The EU has dozens of central securities depositories and central counterparties alongside hundreds of trading venues, while much securities settlement remains concentrated inside individual systems rather than moving seamlessly across the bloc.

Tokenisation could simplify some of those chains, but a proliferation of incompatible digital platforms could reproduce the same fragmentation in a newer technical form. Pontes addresses one part of that risk by creating access to a common settlement asset rather than leaving every platform to depend entirely on private money.

Infrastructure will not integrate the market by itself

The longer-term work sits under Appia, a parallel Eurosystem programme examining how a European tokenised financial ecosystem could operate across platforms, institutions, and national borders. Rather than committing immediately to one architecture, the ECB is considering whether Europe is better served by a shared network, several interoperable networks, or a combination of the two.

Those choices carry competitive consequences. A common infrastructure could reduce duplicated costs and make liquidity easier to pool, while multiple networks could reduce concentration and leave more room for technical innovation. Without interoperability, however, separate platforms risk trapping assets and liquidity inside proprietary ecosystems.

Appia therefore covers more than ledger technology. The ECB is looking at asset interoperability, standards, collateral management, cross-border transactions, resilience, governance, and the legal foundations required for tokenised assets to move between systems. A blueprint is due in 2028.

Legal compatibility may prove as difficult as technical connectivity. A tokenised asset that can move between two networks is of limited use if its ownership status becomes uncertain at the boundary between legal regimes, while automated settlement offers little advantage if participants disagree about when a transaction becomes final.

Those questions are arriving alongside changes to the EU’s digital-asset framework and continuing debate about the DLT Pilot Regime. Tokenised finance will still have to fit inside securities law, prudential regulation, monetary arrangements, and ordinary commercial rights rather than operate as a technologically separate market.

Pontes provides the first operational test because financial institutions will soon have to connect systems and settle real activity through infrastructure linked to the Eurosystem. The service will not decide the final shape of tokenised finance in Europe, but it should begin producing evidence about how central-bank money, private platforms, and distributed ledgers behave together outside an experiment.

The next phase will therefore be judged less by the number of demonstrations and more by transaction volumes, interoperability, legal certainty, and whether financial institutions find enough operational benefit to move meaningful activity onto the new rails. Pontes can provide the settlement bridge; Appia has the harder task of ensuring that the systems on either side develop into a functioning market rather than another set of incompatible platforms.