Why it matters
Almost every argument about tokenized markets ends at the same place: the asset can move on a ledger, and the money to pay for it cannot. Delivery versus payment needs both legs on a system that can bind them together, and the cash leg that institutions actually settle in is a claim on a central bank. If that claim cannot reach the ledger, the tokenized leg settles against a commercial promise, a stablecoin or a same-day instruction to a payment system that closes at night, and the credit risk the ledger was supposed to remove reappears somewhere else.
This is a narrower question than a retail digital currency, and it is the one central banks have spent most of their pilot budgets on. Nobody is proposing that a household hold reserves. What is being decided is whether a tokenized securities platform can reach the settlement asset banks already hold, and by what route.
How it works
Wholesale central bank money is the balance a commercial bank holds in its account at the central bank. It is the top of the money hierarchy: final, non-defaultable in the currency of issue, and available only to institutions with an account. Conventional settlement systems move it. TARGET Services in the euro area and the real-time gross settlement systems elsewhere debit one reserve account and credit another, which is what makes a payment final in law rather than merely recorded.
Three routes connect that asset to a tokenized platform, and they differ in what the central bank has to build.
A trigger solution leaves the reserve balance where it is. The tokenized platform sends an instruction, the existing settlement system moves the money, and a confirmation returns to the ledger, which then releases the asset. Nothing is tokenized on the cash side. The ECB's Pontes track is this shape: a link between distributed ledger platforms and TARGET Services, with a pilot planned by the end of the third quarter of 2026.
An omnibus account holds central bank money in a single account in the name of a payment system operator, which then issues claims on that balance to its participants and moves them on its own ledger. The money never leaves the central bank; what circulates is a fully backed claim on a pooled reserve balance, which is how a private operator can offer settlement in central bank money without the central bank running the platform.
A tokenized reserve is the direct case: the central bank issues its own liability on the platform. Project Helvetia Phase III did this, with the Swiss National Bank issuing a wholesale central bank digital currency in Swiss francs on SIX Digital Exchange's regulated platform to settle tokenised bond transactions with real value, running from December 2023 to June 2024 with six commercial banks. The Reserve Bank of India's wholesale pilot, begun on 1 November 2022 with nine banks, used the same idea to settle secondary-market government securities transactions, with the stated aim of removing the need for settlement guarantee infrastructure.
Economic mechanism
The value of getting the cash leg onto the ledger is not speed. It is the removal of a specific intermediary exposure. In a conventional securities settlement, the buyer's cash and the seller's asset are held by different institutions and reconciled after the fact, so somebody is exposed to somebody else between the trade and the transfer of title. Atomic settlement in central bank money collapses that window, which frees the collateral and liquidity currently held against it.
The saving is real but it is a saving on funding costs, and funding costs are a function of how long the window is and how large the exposure. That is why the wholesale case is strongest where the window is longest: cross-border chains through correspondent banks, and markets whose settlement cycle spans a weekend.
Against that sits an issue central banks care about more than efficiency. Reserves are the anchor of the two-tier system, in which the central bank supplies the settlement asset and commercial banks supply the services. Chapter III of the BIS Annual Economic Report 2026 frames the requirement as singleness, a common unit of account and elasticity of liquidity: claims in the unit must be redeemable at par with central bank money, prices and contracts must be expressed in the same unit, and the central bank must be able to supply settlement balances so payments do not gridlock. Widening access to reserves, or letting a private ledger issue something that behaves like them, is a change to that structure, not an implementation detail.
Participants
Central banks issue the asset and decide the route. Securities settlement systems and the newer regulated platforms supply the asset leg. Commercial banks hold the reserve accounts and are the only direct participants in most designs. Payment system operators run the omnibus arrangements. The BIS Innovation Hub convenes the multi-jurisdiction work, in Project Agorá with the Institute of International Finance.
The cross-border projects add central banks as counterparties to each other. Project mBridge, which reached minimum viable product stage on 5 June 2024, was founded by the Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, the Digital Currency Institute of the People's Bank of China and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, with the Saudi Central Bank joining as a full participant and more than 26 central banks observing.
Examples
The Eurosystem ran the largest single body of evidence. Between May and November 2024, 64 participants ran more than 200 transactions across more than 40 trials and experiments settling distributed ledger transactions against central bank money, with a combined value of about €1.59bn. On 1 July 2025 the Governing Council approved a two-track plan on the strength of it: Pontes to link ledgers to TARGET Services, Appia to examine a longer-term integrated tokenised ecosystem.
Project Agorá is the multi-currency case. Launched on 3 April 2024 and reporting on 27 May 2026, it tested tokenized commercial bank deposits alongside tokenized wholesale central bank money on a shared programmable platform, with seven central banks and more than 40 private financial institutions. Its finding was that atomic multi-currency settlement across jurisdictions is achievable while each central bank keeps control of its own money and transaction privacy is preserved. The next step announced was real-value transactions in certain currencies, not a launch.
Risks and limitations
The pilots are not systems, and the gap between the two is mostly not technical. Agorá's legal analysis supported settlement finality in all seven jurisdictions it examined; what remained was operational and technical alignment across seven central banks, which is a coordination problem that does not get easier with a better ledger.
Access is the harder question. A tokenized platform that cannot reach reserves directly is dependent on a bank that can, which reproduces the tiering the platform was meant to flatten. Widening access would put the central bank in competition with the commercial banks whose deposits fund domestic credit, and no major central bank has proposed it.
There is also a real risk of settling for the appearance of the thing. A trigger solution gives a ledger a confirmation message, not a reserve balance; if the existing settlement system is closed, the confirmation cannot arrive, and the tokenized platform inherits the operating hours it was built to escape. Describing that arrangement as settlement in central bank money is accurate only in the sense that the money eventually moves there.
Finally, the wholesale label does work that should be examined. Several projects filed under it are cross-border retail payment initiatives with a wholesale settlement layer, and at least one is a currency internationalisation programme. The instrument is the same; the policy question is not.
Key metrics
Watch the route rather than the announcement: whether a project tokenizes reserves, holds them in an omnibus account or only triggers an existing system. Then the operating window, because a claim of continuous settlement is limited by the hours of whatever system actually moves the reserve balance. Then real value against test value: the Eurosystem trials moved about €1.59bn across more than 40 exercises, and Agorá stated an intention to move to real-value transactions rather than reporting that it had. Then participant counts, which measure coordination cost as much as reach: 64 participants in the Eurosystem work, seven central banks and more than 40 institutions in Agorá, nine banks in the Indian wholesale pilot, six in Helvetia III.
Related research
The ECB's news item of 4 December 2024 and its decision of 1 July 2025 are the primary record for the euro area. The BIS releases of 3 April 2024 and 27 May 2026 bracket Project Agorá, and Chapter III of the Annual Economic Report 2026 is the clearest statement of why access is treated as a question about the money rather than about the platform. Helvetia Phase III and the Indian wholesale pilot are the two national cases settled in real value rather than in test money; mBridge is the cross-border one, and the analysis piece on settlement pilots that became production sets out which of them turned into a service.