ECB puts Pontes on road to 24/7 tokenised settlement in 2028

The Eurosystem will take Pontes, its settlement service for tokenised assets, to 24/7/365 availability in 2028, with operating hours extended significantly by mid-2027. Piero Cipollone, a member of the ECB's Executive Board, gave the timeline on 29 October at an EU T+1 Industry Committee event in Frankfurt, and added that the Eurosystem plans to offer immediate settlement finality on its DLT platform "as early as next year."

Pontes went live on 21 September. It lets wholesale transactions in tokenised assets settle in central bank money by connecting market DLT platforms to TARGET Services. The launch answered the loudest complaint from the Eurosystem's 2024 DLT experiments: participants told the central banks that access to a risk-free settlement asset was the condition for adopting the technology at scale.

An initial cohort is already onboarded, according to the launch press release. Thirteen institutions took a market-participant slot, among them Deutsche Bank, Santander, Société Générale, DZ Bank, BayernLB, the European Investment Bank and KfW. Four DLT operators connected: Axiology, Cashlink, Clearstream and SWIAT. The Deutsche Bundesbank joined too, in a market participant capacity. The ECB has not published transaction volumes for the service's first weeks, which is worth remembering when reading any claim about how busy Pontes is.

The timing of Cipollone's speech was not accidental. On 28 October the Eurosystem published the report on its public consultation about Appia, the longer-run initiative to design an integrated European ecosystem for tokenised finance around common standards. The consultation found broad support for an ecosystem anchored in central bank money and, in the ECB's telling, a high willingness among respondents to contribute actively. The Appia blueprint is due by 2028, with Danmarks Nationalbank participating alongside the Eurosystem.

There is also a self-interest angle the ECB flagged itself on 21 September: preparatory work to invest a small portion of its own funds in tokenised securities, settled via Pontes. The portfolio is non-monetary policy, the income helps fund the bank's operating expenses. Initial purchases will target euro-denominated securities from euro area central and regional governments, agencies and European supranationals. The Executive Board will set operational details and timing once the preparatory work is done. Central banks learn differently when they are the investor, and the ECB is saying out loud that it wants that experience.

The T+1 frame matters for why Europe is moving on two tracks. On 11 October 2027 the EU securities market moves from T+2 to T+1 settlement. Cipollone used the occasion to point out that T2S, the existing securities settlement platform, already handles substantial T+1 and T+0 volumes, with changes to night-time settlement planned for June 2027 ahead of the migration. In parallel, since 30 March the Eurosystem has accepted marketable DLT assets issued in central securities depositories as eligible collateral for its credit operations, and it is now assessing whether DLT-based assets issued outside the currently eligible settlement systems can also qualify.

My read: Europe is building the rails from the top down while American banks extend private ones into public chains. JPMorgan put its deposit token on Ethereum mainnet on 19 October, stablecoin issuers keep growing, and none of that settles in central bank money. Pontes is the counter-move, and the collateral eligibility decisions are its sharpest edge, because the Eurosystem gets to define what counts as safe collateral regardless of which ledger an asset lives on. The risk is pacing. Full implementation lands in 2028, and a market that standardises on commercial settlement assets in the meantime does not automatically wait for the central bank to catch up. Extending operating hours by mid-2027 is the near-term tell: if the ECB accelerates that date, the rails are getting real demand. If not, Pontes stays a compliance-friendly backstop nobody rushes to use.

What to watch: the first disclosure of Pontes volumes (there is none as of 1 November), whether the operating-hours extension arrives before mid-2027, the collateral decision on DLT assets issued outside eligible systems, and when the ECB's own tokenised purchases actually settle.