Pontes & Appia - Eurosystem strategy for a competitive and integrated tokenised financial ecosystem in Europe

The Eurosystem is committed to further a digital savings and investments union in Europe by fostering increased market efficiency and integration. In particular, it has been analysing how a deeper, more integrated European capital markets for digital assets could be achieved.

Increasingly, market participants are interested in settling digital asset transactions in central bank money and scaling their distributed ledger technology (DLT) infrastructures. To address the risk of fragmentation in the financial market through the uncoordinated development of DLT platforms and the need for harmonisation and to ensure the availability of a risk-free settlement asset wholesale financial markets transactions, the Eurosystem launched a strategy to settle transactions recorded on DLT in central bank money. Taking into account the temporal dimension of the strategy, it consists of two complementary initiatives: Pontes and Appia. Appia focuses on building an innovative, integrated, and sustainable ecosystem for wholesale financial markets, including payments, across Europe, covering the entire value chain. Pontes complements Appia by enabling DLT-based transaction settlement in central bank money by 2026.

The high-level information session at the House of the Euro in Brussels will provide the opportunity for gaining insights into the economic and political rationale for the launch of the Eurosystem’s Pontes and Appia initiatives, their relationship with the digital euro project, as well as the regulatory responses, operational challenges and market perspectives.

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