ECB picks euro-denominated settlement over stablecoins as Pontes launches

The European Central Bank (ECB) delivered its new Pontes Eurosystem rail on Monday, allowing banks to exclusively settle tokenized asset trades in money issued by the central bank, locking out privately issued stablecoins or bank deposits from the digital payment system. 

ECB President Christine Lagarde confirmed the launch following the Eurogroup meeting, with the president due to make opening remarks at a Pontes roundtable in Frankfurt at 17:00 CET. The ECB’s schedule shows Executive Board member Piero Cipollone chairing a panel afterward.

What is the ECB’s Pontes platform? 

Pontes, which translates as “bridges” in Latin, is an ECB’s project that connects distributed-ledger technology platforms run by market operators to the apex bank’s TARGET Services, which already allows banks to move large-value euro payments. 

Axiology, one of the four distributed ledger technology (DLT) operators, along with Cashlink, Clearstream and SWIAT, runs a permissioned stack derived from XRP Ledger technology. 

However, that does not mean that the XRP token or XRPL is included in the ECB’s Pontes project, which settles exclusively in euros issued by the central bank itself. 

Pontes is separate from the digital euro that the ECB is developing for retail and households. The platform is built specifically for financial institutions and market infrastructure.

Why the ECB chose its own money as the anchor

The ECB’s choice of euro-denominated central-bank settlement over using stablecoins to settle the cash leg is in line with the central bank’s position regarding stablecoins and CBDCs, as Cryptopolitan has covered before. 

The Eurosystem’s perspective that tokenized commercial-bank deposits and regulated stablecoins may take on a larger role as markets adopt DLT, but that central-bank money “should remain the anchor for settlement,” was built into how Pontes works. 

Pontes offers a dual-settlement model: 

• Participants can settle using digital tokens that represent central-bank money on a Eurosystem DLT platform
• The other option is to settle in T2, the existing payment system. 

Either way, the trade is only final once it is recorded in T2, which is what gives every settlement the same legal certainty the euro payment system provides today.

Built on €1.5 billion of testing

Pontes did not arrive from nowhere. Between May and November 2024, the Eurosystem ran more than 50 trials with 64 market participants, testing how DLT-based wholesale transactions could settle in central-bank money. A separate ECB assessment cited by EU Today put the value processed during that phase at more than €1.5 billion.

The ECB approved its tokenization strategy in July 2025 as a two-track plan, token-city.com reports. Pontes is the near-term track built to reach the market quickly; a second project, Appia, looks further ahead at a more deeply integrated ecosystem, with a blueprint expected in 2028. 

Pontes itself starts as a focused pilot with limited operating hours, and an enhanced version designed to run around the clock is also targeted for 2028. The ECB is still finalizing eligibility criteria for the assets, participants and DLT operators that can join.

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