On 21 September 2026, the Eurosystem launched Pontes. It connects distributed ledger platforms to TARGET Services, the Eurosystem's payment and settlement infrastructure. European markets have been able to issue and move tokenized securities for several years, under national law and the EU's DLT Pilot Regime. Until now, though, the cash side of those trades had to settle in commercial bank money or in privately issued tokens.

Settling in a private balance leaves the party waiting on payment holding a claim on a commercial issuer until both sides match. A risk team prices that as counterparty exposure and caps it with a limit. That's why settlement windows and issuer concentration come up in a tokenized trading proposal long before the technology does.

Under Pontes, payment becomes final once the matching transaction completes in T2, the Eurosystem's real-time gross settlement system, and the asset is released against that confirmation.

Institutions already know this structure from T2S, the Eurosystem's securities settlement platform. There, securities held at a central securities depository (CSD) settle against central bank money on a delivery-versus-payment basis, so neither party gives up its side without receiving the other. Pontes extends that guarantee to platforms outside the CSD perimeter, including systems authorised under the DLT Pilot Regime. Legal finality stays in T2 and does not move onto the market ledger.

Pontes is the near-term half of a two-track programme the ECB's Governing Council approved on 1 July 2025. The second track, Appia, is working out how an integrated European ecosystem for tokenized assets should be built, with a blueprint due in 2028. Europe has chosen to connect existing platforms now and integrate them later, and that order decides what institutions can build over the next two years. 

Two Settlement Options, One Point of Finality

The service that went live consolidates three interoperability solutions, each built by a different national central bank and each tested between May and November 2024 in an exercise involving 64 market participants across nine jurisdictions, which settled close to 1.6 billion euro in central bank money. 

The launched design takes one element from each of the three.

Sources: ECB, exploratory work on new technologies for wholesale central bank money settlement, and ECB, Pontes design overview, both retrieved 21 September 2026. The third column maps the published Pontes design onto the solutions it draws on.

Institutions therefore choose between two ways of settling the money. They can hold cash tokens on a Eurosystem distributed ledger platform, or they can settle in T2 directly. Processing runs end to end with T2 on either route, which removes the manual intervention the older interfaces required.

A trade spanning two ledgers fails in a specific way, where one side records a transfer and the other does not, leaving a position somebody has to unwind by hand. Pontes handles that through the Hash-Link protocol, which holds both sides against a cryptographic condition and releases them together or not at all. An operations team is therefore left with no unmatched asset position to reconcile.

Authorisation as the Price of Entry

Access depends on two Eurosystem eligibility tests: one for the institution moving the money and another for the platform holding the asset. 

On the cash side, institutions must have existing access to T2 under the TARGET Guideline, allowing them to use current bank account relationships. On the asset side, the Eurosystem explicitly specifies which platform operators are eligible to connect:

• Central securities depositories authorised under the CSD Regulation.

• Operators of a DLT settlement system or a DLT trading and settlement system authorised under the DLT Pilot Regime.

• Operators of an EU or EEA payment system subject to oversight by a competent authority.

• Central counterparties authorised under EMIR.

• Credit institutions, investment firms and market operators authorised under CRD or MiFID II and subject to financial market infrastructure supervision, or assessed case by case by their national central bank.

The design admits no platform operating outside a European supervisory perimeter. That sets the terms on which the wider on-chain market meets this infrastructure. For anyone building on it, authorised status becomes the scarce asset.

Faster Settlement Changes Intraday Liquidity Planning

Securities settlement in the euro area has long relied on batching, netting and cut-off times, and banks have sized their liquidity buffers around them. Settlement that completes in seconds against a live central bank balance needs the funding in place at the moment of the trade. A treasury team running both models at once has to size its buffer for the faster one while most of its volume still runs through the slower one. That calculation is worth doing before tokenized volumes grow. 

The same shift reaches collateral policy, because the Eurosystem began accepting DLT-based assets as eligible collateral for its credit operations in March 2026, starting with assets issued in central securities depositories. A tokenized bond that settles against central bank money and can also be pledged for Eurosystem liquidity is a different instrument, in balance sheet terms, from one that does neither.

The near-term constraint on all of this is the clock, since the initial service runs with limited operating hours and wider availability is planned as part of the enhanced version targeted for 2028. Until then, a market that aims to trade around the clock meets a settlement asset available for part of the business day. Any funding plan built on the first assumption will be settled against the second.

Appia Decides Whether Fragmentation Repeats On-Chain

Europe's market is already split across many infrastructures. Piero Cipollone, a member of the ECB's Executive Board, has put the count at 31 CSDs, 14 central counterparties and 323 trading venues in the EU, with more than 95 percent of transactions in 2023 settled between parties inside a single CSD. A bridge between platforms improves what each one can do without reducing how many there are. Tokenized infrastructure built venue by venue would repeat that pattern in a newer format.

Appia is where the architecture gets decided. Its 2028 blueprint will cover common infrastructure, standards and market design. The options under discussion range from a single shared ledger, to a central bank ledger linked to private networks, to a set of interoperable ledgers. Each gives a different answer on who operates what.

The bigger constraint is legal. Securities law is not harmonised across the EU, and a token whose legal treatment changes at a national border cannot support a single European market, however well the settlement layer performs.

Volumes through Pontes in its first year will be modest, and judging the launch by them would miss the point. Europe has now decided where the cash side of a tokenized market belongs: central bank money at the boundary, with supervised status as the condition for reaching it. The open question is whether Appia delivers one architecture or a connected set of silos. That outcome will shape Europe's standing in tokenized markets more than anything in the Pontes design.

Sentora builds the deployment infrastructure institutions use to put balances to work on-chain under a defined policy, with the controls and reporting a risk committee can review.

Sources

• European Central Bank, "Pontes", ecb.europa.eu, retrieved 21 September 2026. Design overview, dual settlement model, finality in T2, Hash-Link, eligibility criteria.

• European Central Bank, "ECB commits to distributed ledger technology settlement plans with dual-track strategy", press release, 1 July 2025.

• European Central Bank, "The Eurosystem's exploratory work on new technologies for wholesale central bank money settlement", report, June 2025. 64 participants across nine jurisdictions, over 50 trials and experiments, nearly 1.6 billion euro settled between May and November 2024.

• Piero Cipollone, "Building the rails for Europe's tokenised financial markets", speech, Brussels, 23 March 2026. AFME estimate of close to 4 billion euro in DLT-based fixed income since 2021, and DLT-based assets accepted as Eurosystem collateral from March 2026.

• Piero Cipollone, "From vision to delivery: building Europe's tokenised financial market", speech, Frankfurt, 26 August 2026. Fragmentation figures and United States tokenized repo volumes.

• EU Today, "ECB Launches Pontes as Europe Moves Tokenised Finance into Central-Bank Money", 21 September 2026. Launch date and roundtable.

• Ledger Insights, "ECB to extend TARGET hours enabling Pontes, 24/7 DLT settlement", May 2026. Limited operating hours at initial launch, enhanced version in 2028.