During a meeting of EU finance ministers on Friday, European Central Bank (ECB) President Christine Lagarde alluded to a tokenized issuance coming soon from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the euro area’s crisis fund and a regular issuer of bonds and bills. It follows last month’s launch of Pontes, the Eurosystem service that enables tokenized transactions to settle in central bank money and includes its own distributed ledger.
Describing Pontes, Lagarde said, “It is essentially rails on which tokenized assets can travel in a coordinated fashion and can be settled on those rails. It’s working. We launched it. And I’m pleased to report that Pierre, if he had been here, would have also indicated that they will soon issue in tokenized form on Pontes and we’ll be delivering a European result in that respect.”
Lagarde did not say whether the issuance will be a digital bond or a shorter term instrument. She also did not mention the ESM by name. However, ESM Managing Director Pierre Gramegna took part in the Eurogroup press conference the previous day, and earlier this year the ESM’s finance chief said it wanted to be part of Pontes as an issuer. A spokesperson for the ESM declined to comment.
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