ECB’s Cipollone lays out roadmap for Europe’s tokenised financial market, with 2028 deadline looming

The European Central Bank is done talking about tokenisation in the abstract. Piero Cipollone, a member of the ECB’s Executive Board, has outlined a concrete timeline for building a tokenised financial market infrastructure across Europe, anchored by the Pontes project launching in Q3 2026 and a broader ecosystem roadmap called Appia targeting completion by 2028. The Pontes project and the plumbing underneath At the core of Cipollone’s vision is Pontes, a project designed to connect market-facing distributed ledger technology platforms directly to TARGET Services, the Eurosystem’s existing settlement infrastructure. The practical effect: DLT-based transactions could settle in tokenised central bank money rather than relying on commercial bank deposits or stablecoins. In 2024, the Eurosystem ran DLT trials that processed roughly €1.6 billion in transactions across nine jurisdictions. Those trials served as a proof of concept, demonstrating that central bank money settlement on DLT platforms is technically feasible at meaningful scale. Pontes takes that from pilot to production. Its September 2026 launch date is ambitious by central bank standards. Appia: the road to 2028 Published o...