News, data and analysis on tokenized assets, market design and digital economic systems.
Responsible for euro area monetary policy since 1 January 1999 and operator of TARGET Services, it committed in July 2025 to a two-track approach to distributed ledger settlement: Pontes, piloting in the third quarter of 2026, and Appia.
Established on 1 June 1998 and responsible for euro area monetary policy since 1 January 1999, it operates TARGET Services with the national central banks of the Eurosystem. On 1 July 2025 it committed to a two-track approach to distributed ledger settlement: Pontes, whose pilot is planned for the third quarter of 2026, links market DLT platforms to TARGET Services so that delivery-versus-payment transactions settle either in cash tokens on a Eurosystem DLT platform or finally in T2, synchronised through the Hash-Link protocol; Appia is the longer-horizon track with no launch date set. Separately, the digital euro pilot is scheduled to begin in the second half of 2027 and run for twelve months, with possible first issuance from 2029 and only once the enabling regulation is adopted. Its position is that tokenized markets should keep central bank money as the settlement anchor rather than migrate to privately issued substitutes.
Developments in which European Central Bank is a named party, newest first.
The European Parliament approved its position on the digital euro regulation on 9 July 2026, following a committee vote in June. Trilogue negotiations with the Council and Commission were expected to begin by the end of July, with the aim of concluding the…
The European Commission opened a two-part consultation on revising the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation in May 2026, with responses due by 30 August 2026. The review's central…
The European Central Bank published a study of the tokenised bond market in Issue 33 of its Macroprudential Bulletin on 13 April 2026, comparing matched samples of tokenised and…
The Bank for International Settlements reported that the Project Agorá prototype showed tokenisation of central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits can support atomic multi-currency settlement across jurisdictions while leaving each central bank in control of its own money and preserving transaction privacy. Eight central banks and more than 40 private financial institutions took part, and the project said the work would advance to real-value transactions in certain currencies.
The ECB Governing Council approved a plan for settling distributed ledger technology transactions in central bank money on two tracks. Pontes is to link DLT platforms to TARGET Services, with a pilot planned by the end of the third quarter of 2026; Appia examines a longer-term integrated tokenised ecosystem. The decision followed exploratory work between May and November 2024 that involved 64 participants and more than 50 trials.
The ECB reported the conclusion of Eurosystem trials and experiments settling transactions recorded on distributed ledgers against central bank money. 64 participants ran more than 200 transactions across more than 40 trials and experiments between May and November 2024, with a combined value of about €1.59bn.
What issued, what settled, what the supervisors changed, with the numbers behind it and a note on what the numbers do not show. One email, Thursday mornings.
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