European regulators have officially opened the application window for the new European Tokenisation Standards Group (ETSG), marking the next step in the bloc’s push to build a unified tokenized finance market. The European Central Bank (ECB), the European Commission and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) announced on Monday, November 9, 2026, that applications will remain open through November 27, 2026.
The ETSG is open to trade associations, global institutions, private firms, fintechs and technical providers operating within the European Union. Selected participants will begin work in January 2027 and will be responsible for reaching consensus on technical details and market standards for holding and settling tokenized securities across different distributed ledger technology (DLT) platforms, while maintaining compatibility with existing EU financial systems.
The group is also expected to build a monitoring system for EU authorities to track whether members actually adopt the standards and may recommend a framework to ensure broad adoption. Notably, the ECB, Commission and ESMA will hold observer roles without voting power, leaving active roles — including the group chair — to industry participants.
The initiative is driven by concerns that Europe’s tokenized market could fragment into incompatible DLT networks. The EuroGroup warned in July 2026 that 'without shared standards, the multiplication of DLT networks risks recreating and compounding the fragmentation.' ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone highlighted the scale of the existing fragmentation, pointing to 31 central securities depositories, 14 central counterparties and 323 trading venues operating across Europe, with more than 95% of securities transactions settled inside a single depository as of 2023.
The ETSG sits alongside the Eurosystem’s broader tokenization roadmap known as Appia, published in March 2026, and the Pontes system launched in September 2026 to link private DLT platforms to ECB settlement services. The first ETSG standards are due by early 2028, the same timeline set for the Appia blueprint. ESMA is separately running a call for evidence on whether tokenized collateral can survive a market crisis, with responses due by January 15, 2027.
