European Central Bank’s Piero Cipollone highlights role of public money in digital finance

Piero Cipollone, a member of the ECB’s Executive Board, delivered a speech titled “From vision to delivery, building Europe’s tokenised financial market” on August 26, 2026. Published by the Bank for International Settlements on September 15, the address lays out a concrete roadmap for embedding central bank money into the infrastructure of distributed ledger technology platforms across Europe. The case for public rails Cipollone’s core argument is straightforward: digital finance needs a risk-free settlement asset, and only central bank money fits that description. Without it, he contends, markets built on distributed ledger technology could fragment into competing private ecosystems, each carrying counterparty risk that traditional finance spent decades learning to manage. Cipollone has been beating this drum since at least 2024, consistently advocating for tokenisation and DLT as tools for market efficiency, but only when anchored to public monetary instruments. His latest speech marks a shift from advocacy to implementation timelines. Pontes, Appia, and the digital euro Two initiatives sit at the center of the ECB’s strategy. The first, called Pontes, is designed to connect com...