Brussels published a policy paper framing distributed ledger technology as the foundation of an 'internet of value' and confirmed that Pontes, the Eurosystem's DLT settlement platform, will go live in the third quarter of 2026 — making Europe the first major jurisdiction to offer central bank-settled tokenised asset trading.
The European Commission published a policy paper on Monday framing distributed ledger technology and tokenisation as the foundations of an "internet of value" — and backed the rhetoric with a concrete timeline, confirming that the Eurosystem's Pontes settlement platform will go live in the third quarter of this year.
Pontes — the bridge connecting market DLT platforms with the Eurosystem's TARGET Services — will enable settlement of euro-denominated tokenised transactions in central bank money. That is a significant qualifier. Most tokenised asset settlement today relies on stablecoins or commercial bank deposits; settling in central bank money eliminates the credit risk that comes with private settlement layers and gives institutional investors the same finality guarantees they get in traditional securities markets.
The platform builds on exploratory work the European Central Bank conducted throughout 2024 with commercial banks and market infrastructure operators. Those experiments demonstrated that DLT-based settlement could work technically; Pontes is the step that makes it operational. Market participants that took part in the 2024 trials will be among the first to connect when the platform launches, likely in September or October.
Alongside Pontes sits Appia, a longer-term initiative aimed at designing a fully integrated digital financial market by 2028. Where Pontes solves a specific problem — how to settle tokenised transactions in risk-free central bank money — Appia attempts something more ambitious: building the architecture for a market in which tokenised bonds, equities, and fund units trade, clear, and settle on interoperable distributed ledgers without the friction that defines today's post-trade infrastructure.
European Commissioner for Financial Services Maria Luís Albuquerque set the tone in December when she declared that "DLT and tokenisation may well become the new operating system of financial markets." The April paper makes clear that this was not metaphor. The Commission is positioning the EU as the first major jurisdiction to offer regulated, central bank-settled tokenised asset trading — a claim that, if Pontes delivers on time, would be difficult for the United States or Asia to match in the near term.
The regulatory groundwork is already laid. The Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA, has been fully applicable since December 2024, establishing harmonised rules for crypto-asset service providers and issuers across all 27 EU member states. The DLT Pilot Regime, running in parallel, allows market participants to test trading and settlement of tokenised shares, bonds, and UCITS under targeted exemptions from existing securities law.
The numbers suggest the industry is already moving faster than the regulation. An estimated 87 per cent of financial institutions globally are now exploring tokenisation in some form, according to the Commission's paper. JP Morgan, HSBC, BNP Paribas, and Citi all offer tokenised deposits. Tokenised US Treasuries alone have reached $13.5 billion, a market that barely existed two years ago. SWIFT has advanced its own blockchain settlement prototype to MVP with 40 banks participating in a live test of tokenised cross-border payments.
Europe's advantage — and it is an advantage, at least for now — is that it has both the regulatory framework and the central bank infrastructure in place to make tokenised settlement work at institutional scale. The United States has no equivalent to MiCA; its market structure bill, the CLARITY Act, has not even received a Senate markup date. Asia is further along in some respects — Japan reclassified crypto as a financial instrument this month, and South Korea is running its own deposit token pilot — but neither has announced a sovereign settlement layer on DLT.
The question for 2026 isn't whether tokenisation will happen. Bernstein has called it a supercycle; the ECB is building the pipes. The question is whether the assets flow through European infrastructure or route around it — and whether Pontes, when it launches this autumn, can process volume at a scale that justifies the political capital the Commission has invested.
