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Piero Cipollone, a member of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) Executive Board, said the Eurosystem is preparing to issue tokenised central bank money to settle digital-asset transactions on distributed ledger technology (DLT), in remarks delivered in Rome on 12 February 2026. In the speech, Cipollone positioned tokenised central bank money as a risk-free, euro-denominated settlement asset for DLT-based transactions.
Cipollone said the Eurosystem plans to offer a solution for settlement of DLT-based transactions in central bank money “as early as the third quarter of 2026,” naming the near-term initiative “Pontes.” He also described a longer-term workstream, “Appia,” aimed at designing—together with market participants—a pan-European DLT-based ecosystem, framed as either a shared ledger or an interoperable network, with the euro as the settlement anchor.
The ECB has separately described Pontes as a bridge linking market DLT platforms with TARGET Services to enable settlement in central bank money, and has indicated a Pontes pilot is expected by the third quarter of 2026. In the same speech, Cipollone said a paper providing more detail on how the Eurosystem will pursue Appia will be published in the coming weeks.
The announcement sits within a broader Eurosystem roadmap on wholesale DLT settlement that the ECB’s Governing Council set out in mid-2025, endorsing a two-track approach: Pontes as the short-term track and Appia as the longer-term initiative. The ECB said at the time that the plan followed exploratory work conducted in 2024, involving dozens of participants and more than 50 trials and experiments. Appia’s stated scope includes exploring the feasibility of a European shared ledger that could bring together central bank money, commercial bank money and other assets on a single platform, as well as a network of interoperable ledgers.
Operationally, the ECB has also been moving on adjacent infrastructure and eligibility questions relevant to tokenised asset issuance and settlement. In January 2026, the ECB said the Eurosystem would accept marketable assets issued in central securities depositories (CSDs) using DLT-based services as eligible collateral for Eurosystem credit operations from 30 March 2026, while noting that further work would take account of EU and national legal frameworks, including the CSD Regulation, the EU DLT Pilot Regime and MiCA.
For issuers and platforms using DLT to structure tokenised real-world assets—including tokenised real estate exposures—the development is primarily relevant to how on-chain or DLT-based transactions could be settled using central bank money, and how connectivity to TARGET Services may be implemented under the Pontes design described by the ECB. Market participants and regulators are also directly implicated by the ECB’s Appia workstream, which the ECB says is being developed with market participants and is expected to be detailed further in an upcoming Eurosystem paper.
