In brief: The Eurosystem sets the course for a future tokenised market with Appia

The Eurosystem presented Appia, its roadmap to structure the development of a wholesale financial ecosystem based on tokenisation. The initiative aims to ensure that the central bank currency remains the market benchmark, despite the development of distributed registry technologies (DLT) and digital assets.

Appia should enable the future European framework for the issuance, trading and settlement of assets in the form of tokens to be defined with public and private actors. Piero Cipollone, member of the Executive Board of the ECB, sees this approach as a way of gradually orchestrating the migration of financial markets to tokenised environments, while retaining the central bank currency as a reference pillar.

This roadmap is linked with Pontes, the Eurosystem's DLT solution expected in the third quarter of 2026 for central bank currency settlement. While Pontes intends to meet immediate operational needs, Appia has a vision anchored in a long strategic horizon: to determine how European wholesale markets could operate on tokenised, shared and interoperable infrastructures.

The Eurosystem intends to formalise this trajectory by 2028. The preparatory work will build on the experiments conducted in 2024 with more than sixty market participants, mobilized around cases of use involving DLT and intelligent contracts. A questionnaire was published to collect feedback from interested institutions.

Beyond technological advances, Appia aims to reduce disparities between markets, strengthen European competitiveness and preserve the effectiveness of monetary policy.

In short, Appia carries a strong inherent project: to strengthen the stature of the euro, while the transformation of financial infrastructures is undermining the maps of international monetary balances.

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