ECB Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel told the Jackson Hole gathering that central-bank money must move on-chain to protect the euro's monetary sovereignty. The ECB's Pontes bridge pilots in September 2026, linking market blockchain platforms to the Eurosystem's payment rails, while BIS General Manager Pablo Hernández de Cos backed the same position hours later.
Isabel Schnabel used her August 28 Jackson Hole appearance to deliver one of the most direct central-bank statements yet on tokenization: central-bank money on blockchain is no longer optional. She argued that if public money stays off-chain while financial assets move on-chain, dollar stablecoins will become the default cash leg, threatening European monetary sovereignty. Tokenization and stablecoins sit at the center of the debate she is describing.
Pontes bridges DLT to the ECB's payment rails
The ECB is not waiting on the debate. Pontes, the Eurosystem's near-term bridge infrastructure, is set to pilot in September 2026, connecting market distributed ledger technology platforms directly to TARGET Services, the Eurosystem's existing payment rails.
Pontes is more than a bridge, though. It will feature a Eurosystem-operated DLT platform for settling tokenized transactions in central-bank money, with smart contracts and 24/7 operations already on the roadmap. Settlement finality will ultimately sit on that Eurosystem DLT layer rather than only in T2, as before.
Schnabel's speech came alongside a paper by Stanford's Darrell Duffie, drawing a clear line on stablecoins: they are complements, not substitutes, useful for payments at the edge but unable to expand liquidity elastically in a crisis. The ECB has already tested the approach, having run 2024 DLT settlement trials with 64 participants across nine jurisdictions, settling approximately €1.6 billion in central-bank money.
BIS and ECB align on a three-layer stack
Beyond Pontes, the ECB's longer-term blueprint is Project Appia, where a contact group of 61 institutions begins work in September 2026 to weigh a single unified European ledger against a network of interoperable ledgers.
Hours after Schnabel spoke, BIS General Manager Pablo Hernández de Cos reinforced the same position: stablecoins are not a credible large-scale payment instrument, and tokenized deposits are the cleaner private-money path, so long as they still settle in central-bank money on blockchain. The BIS and ECB are aligned on a three-layer stack — tokenized reserves, then tokenized deposits, then regulated stablecoins for edge use cases.
The contrast with Washington is sharp. The US is advancing regulated dollar stablecoins under the GENIUS Act framework while blocking a retail CBDC, while Europe is building public on-chain reserves and treating private stablecoins as a complementary layer instead.
Source: CoinGape
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