Pontes, the first track of Europe’s DLT solution for wholesale central bank money and CBDC, plans to launch in September 2026. The Q3 launch was previously described as a pilot, but that label has been quietly dropped. Market participants have wanted continuity since the Eurosystem’s DLT trials ended in 2024, and the reframing signals the ECB’s intent to deliver a production service rather than another experiment.
Pontes is the Eurosystem’s near term solution, not to be confused with the more ambitious Appia initiative for which the roadmap was released earlier this week.
As context, Pontes is an interoperability solution. On one side there will be multiple market DLT platforms, and on the other a single Eurosystem DLT platform, with nodes operated by the national central banks. Interoperability between the two uses a Hashlink escrow-like mechanism.
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