ECB maps tokenized markets delivery from 2026 to 2028

Piero Cipollone, a Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, spoke at the Deutsche Bundesbank’s Symposium on “Future of payments: trends and innovations in Germany and Europe” on August 26, 2026 and attached named projects to specific years. The primary speech is worth pulling up directly if you’re building tokenized securities around European settlement rails, because the sequencing is now explicit rather than aspirational.

Cipollone’s framing was blunt on the stakes. “Tokenisation and distributed ledger technology, or DLT, were beginning to reshape financial markets,” he said. “By representing and transferring assets in the form of programmable data files – tokens – they offered the prospect of making finance more efficient, enabling it to operate around the clock with greater automation and fewer intermediaries.” His stated goal is central bank settlement for DLT transactions — “We want to offer settlement of DLT transactions in central bank money, providing a safe asset and a monetary anchor on which tokenised finance can grow” — and he tied the plan to European payments integration, the euro’s international standing, and what the ECB frames as strategic autonomy.

The structural problem the speech addresses is fragmentation. Europe’s market currently runs across 31 central securities depositories, 14 central counterparties and 323 trading venues. In 2023, more than 95% of transactions by both volume and value settled between parties within the same individual CSD. Less than 5% of activity crossed between CSDs at all. That’s the gap Cipollone’s infrastructure projects are aimed at closing.

From trials to an operating service

The ECB’s 2024 exploratory work covered 64 market participants across 50 trials and experiments. Those transactions totaled roughly €1.6 billion, per a Bank for International Settlements review. The trials demonstrated that central bank money can be used to settle DLT transactions; Pontes is intended to turn that into an operational service.

Pontes is the near-term delivery. “Pontes will turn our commitment to provide central bank money for settling tokenised transactions into an operational service,” Cipollone said. Target: live in 2026, with plans by mid-2028 for 24/7 availability, greater programmability, state-of-the-art resilience and multi-currency capability.

The demand numbers outside Europe are worth noting. Worldwide, tokenized traditional assets recorded on public blockchains increased roughly fivefold — approximately 400% — between March 2025 and March 2026. Separately, a private U.S. platform processed an average of $354 billion in tokenized repo transactions per day in March 2026. The sources do not establish that the U.S. platform grew at the same rate as the global figure, so no March 2025 baseline for that platform can be inferred from it. That global growth is the market context the ECB is working against as it moves toward a Pontes launch in 2026.

Appia sets the wider rules

Pontes handles settlement access. Appia, published in March 2026, targets a blueprint for an integrated European tokenized financial ecosystem by 2028 — and, in this writer’s view, that is the next deadline with the most consequence for the market. Cipollone drew the line between them directly: “Appia addresses the broader architecture, standards and governance of a European tokenised financial ecosystem.”

How do separate tokenized markets connect? What standards apply? Who controls shared infrastructure? Whether Europe converges on one shared ledger or a set of interconnected networks is still genuinely open.

European issuers have placed close to €4 billion in fixed-income instruments using DLT since 2021, according to the same BIS review. The Eurosystem’s 2024 exploratory work, at roughly €1.6 billion, is a simple comparison of unlike measures — trials versus cumulative issuance — not a market-share or adoption metric, but it gives a rough read on ECB trial scale relative to the DLT debt market the BIS cites.

The sequencing the speech establishes: Pontes live in 2026, its expanded service with 24/7 and multi-currency capability by mid-2028, and Appia’s ecosystem blueprint in 2028. Infrastructure choices made in the next two years — around settlement access, governance, and technical standards — will determine which designs fit European public-market plumbing and which don’t. Appia’s 2028 blueprint is the next relevant deadline for participants planning around those choices.

The digital euro sits alongside all of this as a parallel money layer. The European Parliament approved the Regulation for the digital euro, which the ECB says could be issued in 2029, per August 24 interview material published on the ECB’s site. Cipollone said it “would guarantee greater protection for privacy,” and that the Eurosystem would not be able to directly link specific individuals to digital euro transactions, whether used online or offline.