Bridges and causeways: the future of tokenized money

On September 21, 2026, Pontes went live —the system promoted by the European Central Bank to settle in central bank money the operations of the various DLT networks (Distributed Ledger Technology, the technical term with which European regulation refers to the networks on which securities are tokenized).

Technically speaking, Pontes does not tokenize the euro nor does it create an ECB blockchain; it is a bridge that connects those networks with TARGET, the infrastructure on which large financial institutions have settled their wholesale operations since 1999. Even so, it is a crucial move, for several reasons.

Delivering and collecting at once

The first has to do with something elemental: in every transaction a good is exchanged for the money that reflects the agreed price —what is technically called Delivery versus Payment, or DvP for short—. Since Ethereum appeared in 2015, blockchains began to grow popular that make it possible to build transaction systems universally accessible with an internet connection, at any hour, and to exchange instantly, but only if the exchange did not involve a payment in money. In that case, the payment still had to travel on the established rails: bank transfers, credit cards, etc.

This means immediacy is lost, because a system is only as fast as its slowest link, and it also increases the risk of the transaction: nobody wants to risk paying without receiving, nor delivering without getting paid.

The traditional solution has been to use a trusted third party who, escrow-style, holds the payment money and only releases it to the seller when the buyer verifies that the good has been delivered. But that reintroduces exactly the time, the cost and the risk that blockchain promised to eliminate, when the entire innovation of blockchain is the removal of intermediaries.

During the years in which central banks treated tokenization with disdain, the market improvised a solution: stablecoins. This private money, issued by fintechs, has two fundamental advantages for this case: it keeps parity with a fiat currency, such as the dollar or the euro, thanks to reserves of assets considered safe that back every unit issued, and it lives on the blockchain, which allows the payment and the tokenized good to be exchanged at the same time.

But a stablecoin was not regulated money —the European Union fixed that; when it comes to regulating, it shows great diligence, with the MiCA regulation, published in 2023—, and even regulated, a difference with central bank money remains. The main one is that, whatever a regulation determines about the precautions a private entity must comply with, central bank money is the only one that does not depend on anyone’s solvency: its issuer cannot run out of euros, and a central bank euro is always worth one euro.

Pontes allows, precisely, central bank money itself to be the one used in tokenized transactions. And stablecoins must be given credit for having frightened central banks, the most powerful entities in the financial world: their usefulness threatened to displace usage toward a more practical money, albeit with less backing, so they were forced to act.

The second reason is that Pontes amounts to the institutional legitimization of tokenization, which will no doubt boost many other initiatives from many other actors in the financial ecosystem.

Bridges now, causeways later

The ECB presented Pontes on July 1, 2025, together with a second, closely related project, Appia —in homage to the Via Appia, the causeway Rome began building in the 4th century BC and which proved fundamental to its expansion—. Pontes builds bridges between the different DLT networks and the central bank money that already exists, while Appia aims to design an integrated, tokenized financial ecosystem, whose definitive plan they expect to present in 2028.

For those of us working in tokenization, Pontes will not change tomorrow the way the shares of a building are bought or sold, but it lays the foundations so that, in the medium term, the money leg travels on the same rails as the asset leg. This is how markets are built: first the bridges and causeways, then the traffic.

We cannot yet state with clarity what a tokenized financial world will look like, but very few arguments are beginning to remain to doubt that it will be one.

As a show of that conviction, in 2025 the European banking consortium Qivalis was formed, counting among its 37 partners banks of the stature of ING, BNP Paribas, ABN Amro or UniCredit, and a strong Spanish representation: BBVA, CaixaBank, Banco Sabadell, Bankinter, Abanca or Kutxabank. This consortium, headquartered in Amsterdam, obtained from the Dutch central bank this past October 13 its authorization as an electronic money institution, with which it expects to issue its own euro stablecoin in the coming months.

We thus have, in parallel, the ECB connecting central bank money to the blockchain, for operations between financial institutions, and Qivalis bringing private money to the blockchain, issued by a company owned by banks, for companies, payment platforms and, through them, any citizen. Today we need both types of issuance, but we long ago forgot what it was like to live with bills from different issuers, so a small historical exercise is in order to know where the pendulum is taking us.

Back to 1874

Between 1844 and 1874 Spain had a plurality of banknote issuers: banks of Barcelona, Cádiz, Bilbao or Santander issued their own bills —denominated, from 1868 onwards, in our now nostalgic pesetas—. On March 19, 1874, a decree by Treasury minister José Echegaray —yes, the future Nobel Prize in Literature, because there was a time when ministers wrote well— put an end to that and granted the Bank of Spain the monopoly on banknotes.

It is not that the system was free of problems, but that is not what closed it; it was the Treasury’s urgency: the privilege was granted in exchange for a sizable loan to a Government hard-pressed financing the third Carlist war.

The provincial banks had to choose between merging into the Bank of Spain or continuing as commercial banks, without the right to issue their own bills. The banks of Bilbao and Santander, among others, chose the latter.

To be precise, banks have never stopped creating money: every mortgage they grant creates a deposit, and a deposit is private money. What we abandoned in 1874 was competition between bills from different banks, each of them a liability of its issuer that circulates from hand to hand without passing through the books of whoever issued it. That is, exactly, a stablecoin.

One hundred and fifty-two years later, BBVA, heir to the Bank of Bilbao, is a partner of whoever will issue that kind of money again, and Santander connects to the central bank’s bridge.

These ironies of history are what lead me to always recommend looking at it with some memory, because the benefits we embrace today with enthusiasm —programmable money, available at any moment, competition between issuers— will probably bring back problems we had already forgotten.

The first has a technical name, the singleness of money: that one euro is worth one euro whoever issues it. In the free-banking United States of the 19th century, bulletins were published with the discount at which each bank’s bills traded according to its solvency and its distance. The second, panic: in March 2023, USDC, the world’s second stablecoin, fell for a few hours below 0.90 dollars when it became known that part of its reserves was trapped in Silicon Valley Bank, an American bank that had just failed. The third is the perennial question: who answers when the issuer fails.

Echegaray did not close that door because of the problems of the private issuers, but out of the Treasury’s need, and we reopen it today out of the need to respond to new challenges to which central banks did not react promptly. In 2019 they firmly opposed Libra, Facebook’s stablecoin project, while now they are rushing to design the new causeways on which the empire’s money will circulate and to prevent private issuers from displacing them. The difference is that this time we have a century and a half of memory about what can go wrong, and it would be unforgivable not to take the warning.