Building a Single Market for Digital Assets: Tokenisation and Europe's Financial Future
Europe's capital markets have long suffered from fragmentation. Despite decades of integration efforts, the EU still operates 31 central securities depositories, 14 central counterparties, and 323 trading venues. Even within corporate groups that span multiple jurisdictions, cross-border settlement remains the exception rather than the norm.
Tokenisation is now emerging as a genuine opportunity to change that trajectory. In a recent speech by Piero Cipollone, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, delivered at the Deutsche Bundesbank's Symposium on the Future of Payments in Frankfurt. Titled "From vision to delivery: building Europe's tokenised financial market," Cipollone offered a progress report on one of the most significant financial infrastructure projects currently underway in the EU.
Why tokenisation matters
Tokenisation represents the transfer and recording of financial assets as programmable digital tokens on distributed ledger technology (DLT). A single financial asset typically passes through a chain of separate systems across its lifecycle, with information verified and reconciled at every handoff. Tokenisation has the potential to collapse several of these functions into a shared digital environment. This would enable atomic settlement (where cash and securities legs settle together or not at all) and using smart contracts to automate processes like coupon payments, collateral movements, and compliance checks.
Simply put, tokenisation is a chance to reorganise the entire financial value chain. Since Europe's legacy infrastructure is already so fragmented, tokenisation offers something unusual: the possibility to leapfrog decades of accumulated complexity, rather than digitise it. Institutions are already developing tokenised bonds, deposits, and collateral solutions: since January 2026 the Eurosystem has accepted DLT-issued marketable assets from European CSDs as collateral.
From vision to delivery: Pontes and Appia
Pontes is the mechanism for connecting market DLT platforms to the Eurosystem's TARGET Services, so that the cash leg of tokenised transactions settles in central bank money, with synchronisation enabling delivery-versus-payment. This is moving from pilot to live operation in 2026, with attractive early-adoption pricing (one-off onboarding fees only for the initial launch).
Appia addresses architecture, standards and governance for the broader ecosystem. Published in March 2026, its roadmap covers monetary policy implementation and collateral management, the future infrastructure for tokenised central bank money, cross-border transactions, and the legal and regulatory framework needed to support it all. Appia aims to deliver a blueprint for an integrated European tokenised ecosystem by 2028. Appia's findings will shape how Pontes evolves, and the operational experience from Pontes will inform Appia's architectural choices. It's a "learning by doing" approach that pairs near-term delivery with a longer institutional roadmap.
The bigger picture
For a bloc that has pursued a Capital Markets Union for years with limited success, tokenisation offers a different route to the same destination: build the integrated infrastructure from scratch, with central bank money at its core, rather than trying to stitch together 31 CSDs and hundreds of trading venues after the fact. Whether the EU can convert this vision into delivery will be one of the more consequential financial infrastructure developments in the next few years.
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