The European Central Bank wants to bring tokenized central bank money into production. If all goes to plan, Project Pontes will go live on 21 September, giving institutions a way to settle DLT-based transactions in the safest form of money there is.
Pontes offers two settlement models. Institutions can settle using cash tokens, which are tokenized representations of central bank money that live on the Eurosystem’s own DLT. Or they can use a trigger model, where the DLT initiates a conventional payment through the TARGET real time gross settlement system (T2 RTGS). Either way, the settlement is in central bank money, not commercial bank money and not stablecoins. If you have ever wondered why the trigger solution is still an option when you could settle on chain, read on.
Before institutions can access the live production environment, they must demonstrate to their national central bank that they have conducted appropriate testing. That testing phase is starting in early August, but institutions wishing to be among the first group to go live need to register for the production environment with their national central bank by 7 August. These deadlines apply only to the initial go live. Institutions can always join later.
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