Inside Pontes: How Europe Is Bringing Central Bank Money Onchain
A closer look at how Pontes works, how it enables central bank money settlement for tokenized assets, and what its launch means for Europe’s digital securities market.
Louis Tellier
September 17, 2026
Pontes goes live: Next week, on Monday, 21 September, the Eurosystem activates Pontes, which lets tokenized assets on private DLT platforms be paid for in central bank money. For now the money itself stays in TARGET, the payment infrastructure where banks hold their Eurosystem accounts, and Pontes synchronises those payments with the asset transfer on the platform. Over the coming years the Eurosystem plans to bring central bank money onto its own ledger in stages, with 24/7 operation targeted for 2028. Appia, the second track, is due to deliver a blueprint for the wider market by the same year.
Why it matters: Most tokenized bonds in the euro area have so far been settled the old way: the bond sits on a blockchain, the cash arrives through conventional bank accounts, and the two are reconciled afterwards. Pontes closes that gap. It lets the payment run in central bank money on rails that can talk to the asset, so a tokenized bond is paid for and delivered on a delivery-versus-payment basis, with no credit risk on the cash side and no separate reconciliation. For banks and their clients, Monday's launch is the first time this capability exists as a production service rather than a trial, albeit with initial limits on scope and operating hours.
Where the market stands: The solution arrives in a market that has experimented for years and produced little volume.
According to AFME, European issuers placed €893 million in DLT-based bonds in 2025, down from €1.7 billion in 2024, when the Eurosystem’s own trials made up much of the total.
Germany, the euro area’s most active market, introduced a dedicated framework through the eWpG in 2021. Yet DekaBank’s Digital Asset Monitor had recorded just over 250 crypto securities by the end of 2025, representing roughly €1.2 billion in total and largely issued by smaller companies.
The trading side tells a similar story: venues authorized under the EU’s DLT Pilot Regime have seen little activity, with ESMA’s 2025 review identifying the lack of access to central bank money as one reason.
Contrast with the United States: The euro area’s approach stands in stark contrast to the United States, where the same market is being built on private money. Congress is moving to bar a Fed-issued CBDC while giving dollar stablecoins a federal framework under the GENIUS Act. The ECB reads that as a threat: if assets move onchain and public money does not, ECB Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel argued at Jackson Hole in August, dollar stablecoins become Europe’s default cash leg.
How it is built: Pontes merges three prototypes that 64 institutions tested in the Eurosystem’s 2024 trials, one for each job in a settlement.
The Bundesbank’s trigger component moves the money, connecting to T2, the Eurosystem’s real-time gross settlement system.
The Banque de France’s cash-token platform holds it, as the Eurosystem DLT, a permissioned ledger that hosts participants’ wallets.
The Banca d’Italia’s Hash-Link protocol ties it to the asset, which stays locked on the market platform until the Eurosystem confirms payment, so both legs settle or neither does.
Two ways to pay: Together, these three components give participants two settlement options, which they can choose on a transaction-by-transaction basis.
Trigger model: the euros move between the participants' existing T2 accounts, routed through a technical account held by the ECB. Settlement is final the moment T2 settles, exactly as for any other payment.
Cash-token model: a participant funds a wallet from its T2 account and receives tokens representing a claim on the ECB. The tokens circulate on the Eurosystem ledger during the day and become final only when redeemed into T2, by close of business at the latest.
The constraints: At launch, Pontes arrives with many limitations. The service settles from 09:00 to 16:00 CET on T2 business days, in euro only and without netting, for a one-off fee of €2,500 per participant and €15,000 per operator. Longer hours and finality on the Eurosystem ledger are planned for 2027, with 24/7 operation and multi-currency to follow by mid-2028.
Who lets you in: Within those limits, what gets settled depends on who is registered to use the rail. Any T2 account holder can settle plain payments on its own, but paying for a tokenized asset requires a market DLT operator registered with the Eurosystem to take legal responsibility for the asset leg. Four are registered: Clearstream, SWIAT, Cashlink and Axiology, and the Eurosystem imposes no rules on the network the asset lives on, so permissionless chains qualify. Banks can also apply to become operators after a review by their national central bank.
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What happens next: We asked three of the four launch operators one question:
What activity should the market expect over the next twelve months, and what will hold it back?
Thilo Derenbach is Head of Sales & BD, Digital Securities Services at Clearstream, the post-trade subsidiary of financial market infrastructure group Deutsche Börse.
We expect the first transactions to be new issuances of fixed-income products, paid for in central bank money at the moment of issuance. Most investors, however, cannot yet hold securities onchain. Therefore, the newly issued securities will likely move into a conventional securities account right after the primary market phase, which Clearstream can do because of our tokenization and detokenization capabilities. From the client’s account, the security can be mobilised and re-used – financed in repo or pledged to the Eurosystem.
Of course, issuing onchain only to move the security back offchain may look like a detour, but it reflects where the market is. The new payment rails already bring efficiencies in speed and cost today. In future, new decisive business cases will follow, such as intraday yield or fractional lots. A security issued digitally from the start can be bought by investors without blockchain access and held onchain by those who have it, at each client’s own pace.
Raphael Neuberger is Chief Operating Officer at Cashlink, a BaFin-licensed crypto securities registrar that also offers custody and issuance services for financial institutions.
There is strong demand for settling tokenized assets in central bank money, and we expect a few dozen participants to transact through Pontes by the end of 2027, starting with Smart Bonds most likely.
However, what will limit activity in the first year is not the settlement infrastructure itself but everything banks need around it. Secondary markets for tokenized assets are still thin, so most transactions will be primary issuances.
Then there’s the Basel capital rules, which keeps balance sheets cautious. And connecting to Pontes means touching core banking systems, an upgrade banks undertake once in twenty years. So for once, the central bank is ahead of the market, and the participants need to play catch-up.
Sladjan Seferović is Head of Growth Digital Assets at SWIAT, the German startup behind Regulated Layer One, a shared ledger governed by ten European financial institutions including ABN AMRO, DekaBank, Natixis CIB and NatWest.
We expect the first bond issuances to settle in central bank money within months of Pontes going live, as banks begin using the infrastructure for live transactions. Unlike the Eurosystem’s 2024 trials, which focused on proving the technology and processes, institutions are now making architecture and operating-model decisions aligned with their multi-year plans. The goal is no longer another pilot, but infrastructure that supports future transactions.
We expect T2 to remain the dominant cash leg during the first year. Banks already understand its operating model, legal framework and settlement finality, while tokenized central bank money will require more experience and integration clarity before being adopted at scale.
A more fundamental shift concerns who instructs the payment. While DvP is traditionally coordinated through CSD-based infrastructures, Pontes allows institutions to initiate the cash leg directly rather than rely on an operator. Over time, we expect more institutions to explore this model, giving them greater control over the cash leg and their T2 account. This would mark a shift from using DLT within traditional structures towards participant-controlled settlement.