The ECB’s Governing Council has approved a strategy that will allow settling distributed ledger technology (DLT) transactions using central bank funds.
The move follows a two-track plan. The first track, Pontes, offers a short-term offering to the market, including a pilot phase. The second track, Appia, delivers a potential long-term solution. The initiative coincides with the Eurosystem’s mission to support innovation without compromising on safety and efficiency in financial market infrastructures.
More about the announcement
Pontes will deliver a Eurosystem DLT-based solution, connecting DLT platforms with TARGET Services to settle transactions in central bank money. The Eurosystem predicts that the pilot for Pontes will launch by the end of Q3 2026, offering a single solution that encompasses features used in the Eurosystem’s exploratory work on DLT in 2024. During the pilot, the monetary authority will be exploring the feasibility of further improvements in line with the TARGET Services operational, legal, and technical standards as well. Between now and the launch of track one, the national banks of the euro area will consider requests for more DLT-based experiments.
Appia will focus on the long-term plan for an integrated ecosystem in Europe that delivers safe and efficient operations globally. In this phase, the Eurosystem will continue to analyse DLT-related solutions and work together with public and private stakeholders. To make sure that the dialogue is always open between the organisation and the market, the authority will create dedicated market contact groups for both tracks. A call in which companies can express their interest in participating in the Pontes contact group will be published in the near future.
The two tracks will build on the Eurosystem’s exploratory work on new technologies for wholesale central bank money settlement, which was conducted between May and November in 2024. In the experiment, 64 participants conducted over 50 trials, and a dedicated report outlining the results has been published recently.
