The European Central Bank switched on Pontes on 21 September, an infrastructure platform that settles wholesale tokenised asset transactions directly in central bank money rather than commercial bank deposits. Deutsche Bank, Santander and Societe Generale joined as founding participants alongside the European Investment Bank and four distributed ledger operators, including Clearstream, in the platform’s first phase.
Pontes runs on limited hours at launch, 8am to 4pm Central European Time on business days, and the cash leg of every settlement still relies on the existing TARGET2 system rather than a fully native digital ledger. The Eurosystem has said the platform will not be completely operational, meaning running around the clock on its own rails, until 2028. The near-term function is issuance, trading, settlement and custody for tokenised securities such as bonds, connected to smart contract automation on the DLT side.
The timing puts institutional infrastructure ahead of the ECB’s retail digital euro, which remains a 2027 pilot rather than a live product. That sequencing tracks a broader pattern this year of central banks moving faster on wholesale tokenisation, where the customers are known banks the ECB already supervises, than on anything reaching individual consumers directly. Deutsche Bank and Santander both already run tokenised bond desks separately, giving Pontes a base of institutional demand before it opened rather than a platform waiting to find one.
The unresolved part is what Pontes actually replaces. Running the cash leg through TARGET2 rather than a token native to the platform means Pontes automates the paperwork around tokenised settlement without yet removing the legacy rail underneath it, and the ECB has not said when, if ever, that changes.
