ECB Member Insists on Public Anchor for Tokenized Market Growth
ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone said private digital money cannot scale Europe’s tokenized markets on its own. He stated that tokenized deposits and stablecoins need tokenized central bank money as a public settlement anchor.
Cipollone pointed to Pontes, the Eurosystem’s distributed ledger technology settlement initiative. The initiative connects market DLT platforms with the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services. The ECB said Pontes is due for an initial launch in the third quarter of 2026.
"Without tokenised central bank money, a seller of a tokenised security may receive payment in an asset they are not comfortable holding – one exposed to price volatility or credit risk – which limits the market's ability to scale," Cipollone said in a speech at the House of the Euro in Brussels on Monday.
The comments build on the ECB’s Appia initiative, published on March 11. Appia is intended to produce a blueprint for a future European tokenized financial ecosystem by 2028. One of Appia’s building blocks serves as an interoperability standard for assets. Cipollone urged market infrastructure operators, banks, custodians and technology providers to explore and submit feedback related to the Appia roadmap.
Cipollone also said Europe may ultimately need a dedicated legal framework to support the seamless issuance and transfer of tokenized assets across the bloc. He called the European Commission’s proposal to extend the DLT Pilot Regime an “important development,” but cautioned that the absence of a holistic tokenization framework introduces the risk of “building
advanced settlement infrastructure on a patchwork of regulations, leaving us unable to fully reap the benefits.”
The comments come days after stablecoin issuer Circle submitted feedback to the European Commission’s Market Integration Package on March 20. The submission urged lawmakers to expand the existing DLT Pilot Regime and provide e-money token (EMT) cash account services to authorized crypto-asset service providers.