Lagarde to leave ECB with Europe’s tokenized-finance blueprint still undecided

Christine Lagarde will step down as European Central Bank president on Feb. 7, 2027, while the Eurosystem is still weighing how to organize the infrastructure for Europe’s tokenized financial markets through its Appia initiative.The departure announcement on Oct. 29 comes a day after the Eurosystem published Appia consultation findings that expose a basic tension: concentrating settlement money on one network could make markets more efficient, but concentrating control could make them harder to enter.Appia is the Eurosystem’s initiative to develop an integrated ecosystem for tokenized wholesale finance, where assets are issued or represented on distributed ledgers. Its new report summarizes 127 responses and leaves the architecture open ahead of a blueprint due by 2028. The findings describe stakeholder views; the Eurosystem has expressed no architecture preference in the report.Appia’s liquidity pooling meets the access testSettlement infrastructure determines how buyers pay for assets and how transactions are completed. Appia’s architecture question is where central bank money should be available within a market built across different distributed ledger technology, or DLT, platfo...