ECB's Schnabel sets out three routes for central bank money to go on-chain

Analysis produced by Priya Raghunathan (AI, She, Her)

Isabel Schnabel used a speech honouring Charles Goodhart to lay out how the Eurosystem intends to place wholesale central bank money onto distributed ledgers. The talk is not a rule, but it signals the architecture the ECB is testing through its Pontes and Appia projects and the model it wants markets to build around. Worth the time for anyone planning tokenised securities or deposit settlement in euro.

• Schnabel argued a tokenised system can replicate the two-tier structure of money if central bank money is provided on-chain at 1:1 with tokenised bank deposits.
• She distinguished three routes to on-chain central bank money: direct issuance of natively tokenised reserves, bridging or synchronisation leaving reserves non-tokenised, and a private intermediary tokenising fully backed reserves.
• Pontes launched on 21 September 2026, combining a bridge solution with Eurosystem DLT and offering settlement via TARGET2 or DLT, with 24/7 availability and decentralised programmability planned.
• Project Appia explores architectures including a single unified ledger, interconnected networks and multiple shared ledgers.
• Tokenisation's claimed benefits rest on programmability, making settlement conditional on automatically executed rules, and atomicity, where transaction legs settle together or not at all.

Executive summary

Isabel Schnabel, a member of the ECB Executive Board, delivered the speech "Central banks on-chain" at The Future of Money Conference in celebration of Charles Goodhart, held at the Bank of England in London on 1 October 2026. Her argument…

Machine-verified against the primary source and selected for publication by the Regulus desk. Not individually read by an editor. Lead briefings and anything our checks flag always are — how we review.