--- title: "Piero Cipollone: From vision to delivery: building Europe’s tokenised financial market · Aug 26, 2026" description: "Cipollone lays out the Eurosystem's tokenisation delivery plan: Pontes goes live this year linking market DLT platforms to TARGET for central bank money…" source: Helious canonical: "https://helious.io/news/6d2a476b3bd77518bde6a4939daa2de3/piero-cipollone-from-vision-to-delivery-building-europes" --- Ecb 26 Aug 2026, 10:15 UTC # Piero Cipollone: From vision to delivery: building Europe’s tokenised financial market ## SPEECH DIGEST NEUTRAL high confidence · 20.8k characters read Cipollone lays out the Eurosystem's tokenisation delivery plan: Pontes goes live this year linking market DLT platforms to TARGET for central bank money settlement of the cash leg, with promotional pricing (one-off onboarding fees only), extension to 22.5 hours per business day, and a 24/7 multi-currency service by mid-2028. Appia runs in parallel to design the architecture of a single European tokenised market, with a blueprint due 2028. Nothing here touches rates, inflation or the policy stance. This is market plumbing and strategic autonomy, not monetary policy. **What’s new: **Nothing material for rates. The incremental content is operational: confirmation that Pontes goes live this year with fee waivers beyond one-off onboarding, the 22.5-hour then 24/7 by mid-2028 timeline, and the admission that Appia has not predetermined whether Europe gets one shared network or multiple interoperable ones. Also useful colour on scale: tokenised traditional assets on public chains went from EUR 4.7bn to EUR 23.3bn year on year, and DLT-based CSD assets became Eurosystem-eligible collateral in March. Policy stance: absent. ### KEY FINDINGS - Pontes goes live in 2026 connecting market DLT platforms to TARGET Services, with cash-leg finality in central bank money and only one-off onboarding fees at launch. Subsidised pricing is a deliberate push to pull tokenised settlement volume onto Eurosystem rails rather than private settlement assets or stablecoins. - Roadmap: 22.5 hours per business day, then 24/7 with programmability and multi-currency capability by mid-2028. Near-continuous central bank money settlement eventually reshapes intraday liquidity management and repo mechanics, but on a multi-year horizon. - Marketable assets issued via DLT-based services at European CSDs became eligible Eurosystem collateral in March. Direct collateral-framework change: tokenised issuance now carries the same funding value at the ECB window as conventional paper. - Appia has explicitly not decided between a single shared European network and multiple interoperable networks; the blueprint lands in 2028. Infrastructure providers and CSDs still face open-ended architecture risk, so no one can position on the outcome yet. - Cipollone flags loss of the monetary anchor and external dependence as the second and third risks, pointing at private settlement assets that carry credit and liquidity risk. Signals the ECB will keep leaning against dollar stablecoins and offshore infrastructure in the tokenised settlement layer. ### FROM THE DOCUMENT To support its early adoption, we will offer attractive pricing conditions, charging only one-off onboarding fees for the initial launch. By mid-2028, we plan to offer a 24/7 service as well as greater programmability, state-of-the-art resilience and multi-currency capability. Appia paves the way for a single European market for tokenised assets, but we have not predetermined what the architecture for that will actually look like. Without access to central bank money, tokenised markets could become reliant on private settlement assets which carry credit and liquidity risks and do not have the same ability to scale elastically. Two years ago, at this very same Symposium, I argued that Europe had a unique opportunity. [2] Tokenisation and distributed ledger technology, or DLT, were beginning to reshape financial markets. By representing and transferring assets in the form of programmable data files – tokens – they offered the prospect of making finance more efficient, enabling it to operate around the clock with greater automation and fewer intermediaries. At the heart of this transformation lies a Copernican revolution. Tokenised assets will be at the centre of a new digital finance ecosystem that allows issuers, investors and intermediaries to think anew and innovate. But this transformation also poses a risk: a proliferation of incompatible platforms could reproduce, or even deepen, the current fragmentation of Europe’s capital markets. [ Read the full ECB speech at the source →](https://www.ecb.europa.eu//press/key/date/2026/html/ecb.sp260826~3641116314.en.html) Copy link [Follow this live in the terminal →](https://helious.io/)