The European Central Bank has brought its Pontes platform into live operation, marking a concrete step in connecting tokenized securities with central bank money. The Eurosystem confirmed that Pontes went live on September 21 with four distributed ledger technology operators: Axiology, Clearstream, Cashlink, and SWIAT. Major financial institutions including Deutsche Bank, Santander, Société Générale, and the European Investment Bank have completed onboarding to the new settlement infrastructure.
Pontes is designed to link participating DLT platforms with the Eurosystem’s TARGET infrastructure, allowing transactions in tokenized securities to settle using central bank money. The system aims to adapt central bank money to digital financial markets and give officials direct experience with trading, settlement, portfolio management, and related systems.
For the XRP community, the launch contains an important distinction. Axiology operates a private, permissioned blockchain built using the open-source code of the XRP Ledger, but it functions independently from both Ripple and the public XRPL. Only authorized financial institutions can operate nodes, and the European Central Bank is not using XRP or the public XRP Ledger for settlement.
The ECB also announced that it is preparing to invest a small portion of its own funds in tokenized securities. Initial purchases are expected to focus on euro-denominated securities issued by governments, agencies, and European supranational institutions. Those investments will become part of the ECB’s non-monetary policy portfolio and are expected to eventually settle through Pontes.
Although Axiology’s XRPL-derived technology has secured a place among the first systems connected to Pontes, the development is primarily significant for institutional adoption of XRPL code rather than for direct use of XRP in European central bank settlement.
