ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone has called for urgent, coordinated action to build an integrated European market for tokenised financial assets, cautioning that without a deliberate approach, the proliferation of incompatible platforms could reproduce or even deepen the fragmentation that already characterises Europe's capital markets. Cipollone made the remarks at the Deutsche Bundesbank's Symposium on "Future of Payments: Trends and Innovations in Germany and Europe."
Cipollone described the current state of Europe's financial market infrastructure as a key motivation for the push towards tokenisation. The EU currently operates with 31 central securities depositories (CSDs), 14 central counterparties (CCPs) and 323 trading venues. Cross-border settlement remains limited: in 2023, more than 95% of transactions — in both volume and value terms — were settled between parties within the same individual CSD, even in cases where CSDs belong to the same group.
He argued that tokenisation and distributed ledger technology (DLT) could bring multiple stages of the financial asset lifecycle — including issuance, trading, clearing, settlement, custody and asset servicing — into a shared digital environment. Transactions could, in principle, be executed atomically, meaning the cash and asset legs settle together or not at all, with smart contracts automating processes such as coupon payments, collateral movements and compliance checks.
Cipollone cited figures illustrating the scale of global momentum. Worldwide, tokenised traditional assets recorded on public blockchains increased roughly fivefold between March 2025 and March 2026. In the United States, one private platform processed an average of USD 354 billion in tokenised repo transactions per day in March 2026, four times the average daily volume it recorded a year earlier. European institutions, he noted, are also developing tokenised bonds, deposits, collateral and settlement solutions, and in March the Eurosystem began accepting marketable assets issued via DLT-based services at European CSDs as eligible collateral.
Cipollone acknowledged that tokenised real-world assets remain small relative to global markets, with limited liquidity and secondary market activity. He framed the current moment as a critical juncture: the market is, in his assessment, sufficiently advanced for the opportunities to be tangible, but still young enough for Europe to shape its architecture. He said the ECB's Pontes and Appia projects represent concrete steps in translating that vision into delivery, with central bank money positioned at the core of the envisaged ecosystem.
