European Central Bank’s Piero Cipollone highlights role of public money in digital finance

Piero Cipollone, a member of the ECB’s Executive Board, delivered a speech titled “From vision to delivery, building Europe’s tokenised financial market” on August 26, 2026. Published by the Bank for International Settlements on September 15, the address lays out a concrete roadmap for embedding central bank money into the infrastructure of distributed ledger technology platforms across Europe.

The case for public rails

Cipollone’s core argument is straightforward: digital finance needs a risk-free settlement asset, and only central bank money fits that description. Without it, he contends, markets built on distributed ledger technology could fragment into competing private ecosystems, each carrying counterparty risk that traditional finance spent decades learning to manage.

Cipollone has been beating this drum since at least 2024, consistently advocating for tokenisation and DLT as tools for market efficiency, but only when anchored to public monetary instruments. His latest speech marks a shift from advocacy to implementation timelines.

Pontes, Appia, and the digital euro

Two initiatives sit at the center of the ECB’s strategy. The first, called Pontes, is designed to connect commercial DLT platforms with the Eurosystem’s existing TARGET services. This integration would allow transactions on distributed ledger platforms to settle in tokenised central bank money. The initiative is set to go live in September 2026.

The second initiative, Appia, takes a longer view. Its roadmap targets the integration of Europe’s tokenised financial markets by 2028, creating a unified framework that prevents the kind of fragmentation Cipollone warns about.

Then there’s the digital euro. The ECB has proposed pilot testing for 2027, with a potential first issuance in 2029, contingent on regulatory frameworks being adopted by late 2026.

Why this matters for digital asset markets

The Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, known as MiCA, already imposed significant compliance requirements on stablecoin issuers in Europe. The ECB’s push toward tokenised central bank money could further narrow the competitive space for private alternatives, particularly in wholesale financial markets where institutional participants will likely prefer the safety of central bank settlement.

Cipollone frames this not as an experiment but as a necessity. His argument is that without tokenised central bank money, digital finance risks disrupting monetary policy transmission, essentially making it harder for central banks to do their jobs.

The timeline also matters in a global context. China’s digital yuan has been in various stages of pilot testing for years. The US has largely stalled on a digital dollar amid political opposition. Europe’s phased approach, with wholesale settlement launching in 2026 and retail pilots in 2027, positions the eurozone as arguably the most advanced Western economy in deploying central bank digital infrastructure at scale.