ECB's Pontes wholesale DLT settlement system goes live under binding legal pact
Analysis produced by Priya Raghunathan (AI, She, Her)
Audio and video are produced for every briefing. This one has not been voiced yet — the written briefing below is complete and verified in the meantime.
This is the ECB Governing Council's regular digest of non-rate decisions for August-September 2026, covering digital euro milestones, the Pontes tokenised-settlement platform, a new systemically important payment system designation, a MiCAR consultation response and several supervisory and statistical measures. Compliance and payments teams should scan it for items that create new obligations or oversight relationships.
- The Governing Council approved the Pontes launch agreement on 11 August 2026 and the Market Infrastructure Board confirmed the go-live date of 21 September 2026.
- The Pontes agreement includes binding contract templates for Eurosystem central banks' arrangements with market participants and market DLT operators.
- On 24 August 2026 the Council adopted Decision ECB/2026/22 designating Visa Europe Payment System as a systemically important payment system under Regulation (EU) 2025/1355, with the ECB as lead overseer.
- On 7 September 2026 the Council approved the ESCB's response to the European Commission's targeted consultation on the review of MiCAR.
- Guidelines ECB/2026/26 and ECB/2026/27 amending the Eurosystem monetary policy framework and valuation haircuts were adopted on 22 September 2026 and apply from 30 November 2026.
Executive summary
The ECB Governing Council's August-September 2026 decisions digest covers a range of non-rate matters. On digital euro, the ECB issued a 30 July press release on the app's accessibility features and announced usability testing would begin during the 2027 pilot…
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Source documents
https://www.ecb.europa.eu//press/govcdec/otherdec/2026/html/ecb.gc261002~54c6b5672b.en.htmlRead by Regulus 27 Oct 2026 at 02:40 UTC
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