The European Central Bank (ECB) envisions using DLT in the future for a wholesale CBDC and many of today’s core central bank functions, such as collateral management and monetary policy. That’s provided tokenization takes off, according to Holger Neuhaus who leads the ECB’s Project Appia. Although he’s pretty optimistic given the strong participation in ECB DLT settlement trials. He was talking on a panel at Swift’s Sibos event yesterday. Appia is the longer term track of two DLT central bank money payment iterations, with Project Pontes (bridge) as the interim solution that is expected to launch pilots in Q3 of 2026. Pontes builds on the 2024 ECB wholesale DLT settlement trials that involved 61 private institutions. It uses elements of the three trial solutions from the central banks of France, Germany and Italy. Germany’s Trigger solution and France’s wholesale CBDC both link to the TARGET2 payment system and are the two Pontes central bank money options. Italy is providing the Hashlink interoperability solution that will be used by the German and French offerings to link to other DLT networks. Neuhaus described Pontes as a bring-your-own-market-DLT approach, highlighting the potential for fragmentation.