Piero Cipollone, a member of the European Central Bank’s Executive Board, has outlined a concrete timeline for building a tokenised financial market infrastructure across Europe, with the Pontes project launching in Q3 2026 and a broader roadmap called Appia targeting completion by 2028. DLT trials conducted by the Eurosystem in 2024 processed roughly 1.6 billion euros in transactions across nine jurisdictions, demonstrating the technical feasibility of central bank money settlement on distributed ledger platforms. As of March 2026, DLT-issued marketable assets became eligible as collateral for Eurosystem credit operations. European issuers have introduced close to 4 billion euros in DLT-based fixed-income instruments since 2021. Without coordinated public infrastructure, the vacuum risks being filled by private alternatives such as stablecoins or settlement networks controlled by non-European entities.
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