Pontes Opens This Year. It Is Not 24/7 Until Mid-2028.

Piero Cipollone, a member of the ECB's Executive Board, told the Deutsche Bundesbank's symposium on the future of payments in Frankfurt on 26 August that the Eurosystem has moved "from vision to delivery" on tokenised finance. The headline commitment is that Pontes, the service that will let tokenised transactions settle in central bank money, goes live this year.

The schedule underneath that commitment is worth reading closely. Pontes will not operate around the clock at launch, and on the timetable Cipollone set out it will not do so until mid-2028.

What is being delivered, and when

Cipollone described three stages. Pontes goes live this year, connecting market DLT platforms to the Eurosystem's TARGET Services, with the cash leg settling in central bank money and synchronisation enabling delivery versus payment. To encourage early adoption the Eurosystem will charge only one-off onboarding fees for the initial launch.

The service is then enhanced gradually, with operating hours extended to 22.5 per business day and immediate settlement finality in the Eurosystem DLT. Only in the third stage, dated to mid-2028, does the Eurosystem plan to offer a 24/7 service, along with greater programmability, state-of-the-art resilience and multi-currency capability.

The intermediate stage is the one to do arithmetic on. Twenty-two and a half hours across five business days is 112.5 hours. A full week is 168. The enhanced service therefore covers 67 per cent of the week and leaves 55.5 hours outside its operating window, including all of Saturday and Sunday.

That matters because of how the speech itself frames the technology. Cipollone opened by describing tokenisation and distributed ledger technology as offering the prospect of making finance more efficient by, among other things, enabling it to operate around the clock. Continuous operation is not a nice-to-have in that account; it is one of the stated reasons for doing this at all. On the Eurosystem's own settlement rail, it is the last item to arrive.

How long the gap runs depends on a date the speech does not give. Cipollone says Pontes goes live "this year" without naming a month. Taking mid-2028 as the end point, a launch in mid-2026 implies twenty-four months to 24/7 operation and a launch at the end of December 2026 implies eighteen.

Two numbers that will be quoted together, and should not be

The speech offers two figures on the scale of tokenised finance, three sentences apart. Both are striking and they are not comparable.

The first is that tokenised traditional assets recorded on public blockchains worldwide rose roughly fivefold between March 2025 and March 2026. Footnote 6 gives the underlying figures as €4.7 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2025 and €23.3 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2026, a factor of 4.96. That is a stock: the amount outstanding on a date.

The second is that in the United States one private platform processed an average of USD 354 billion in tokenised repo transactions per day in March 2026, four times its average daily volume a year earlier. That is a flow. Footnote 7 identifies the platform as Broadridge's Distributed Ledger Repo, puts it at roughly 7 per cent of daily US repo activity, and adds a caution of its own: the platform's activity includes intraday transactions, implying a higher turnover velocity than in conventional repo statistics.

Set beside each other the two numbers invite a conclusion about Europe falling behind, and the arithmetic that would support it does not exist. One is a level, the other is daily turnover, and the second is flagged by the ECB's own footnote as not directly comparable even to other repo data.

The fragmentation the project is meant to answer

Cipollone gave a count for the problem Pontes and its sister project Appia are meant to address. The EU now has 31 central securities depositories, 14 central counterparties and 323 trading venues — 368 institutions and venues in total. His argument is that a proliferation of incompatible DLT platforms could reproduce or deepen that fragmentation rather than resolve it, which is why the Eurosystem is putting central bank money at the centre from the start.

He also gave a figure for the groundwork: in 2024 the Eurosystem brought together 64 market participants in more than 50 trials and experiments, which established that central bank money can be used to settle transactions on DLT platforms. In March 2026 it began accepting marketable assets issued via DLT-based services at European CSDs as eligible Eurosystem collateral.

What we could not verify

This report is based on the text of the speech as published by the ECB. We did not independently verify the market figures Cipollone cites. The €4.7 billion and €23.3 billion figures are given in a footnote without a named source, and we did not locate the underlying dataset. The Broadridge figures are attributed in the speech but we did not obtain the platform's own disclosures.

We also cannot say when in 2026 Pontes goes live, because the speech does not say, and we did not find a published launch date elsewhere. The eighteen-to-twenty-four-month range in this piece is a range precisely because that date is missing.

Finally, the 22.5-hour figure is what the speech states for the intermediate stage. The speech does not say when that intermediate stage begins, only that it follows the initial launch and precedes mid-2028.

What to watch

Three dates and one absence. The Pontes go-live announcement, which must come before the end of this year if the commitment holds. The start of the 22.5-hour stage, currently undated. And mid-2028 for 24/7, which is the first point at which the Eurosystem's settlement rail matches the operating model that tokenised markets are built around.

The absence is pricing beyond launch. Cipollone says the initial launch will carry one-off onboarding fees only, described as attractive pricing conditions to support early adoption. What replaces that once adoption is established is not stated, and for anyone modelling the cost of settling on this rail it is the number that will matter most.