ECB’s Pontes Goes Live, but 24/7 Wholesale Settlement Must Wait Until 2028
Oct. 30, 2026 • Deep Dive • Digital Assets
The European Central Bank has launched Pontes, a bridge connecting tokenised-asset platforms to the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services for wholesale settlement in central bank money. The arrangement enables atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement, in which an asset and its payment move together. It does not yet make wholesale settlement available around the clock: Pontes depends on T2 operating hours and requires tokenised central bank money balances to be defunded at the end of the day.
ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone says the Eurosystem plans to extend Pontes operating hours substantially by mid-2027 and reach 24/7/365 availability in 2028. Separately, the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Agorá has tested cross-border payments using a shared programmable ledger that brings tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves into a single settlement process. Both initiatives address delays and liquidity demands in wholesale payments, but neither makes continuous, cross-border settlement available today.
The European Central Bank has put Pontes into live operation, connecting market platforms for tokenised assets to the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services so wholesale transactions can settle in central bank money. The September 2026 launch gives market participants a way to coordinate the transfer of an asset with its payment. It does not, however, make that settlement available at every hour of the week.
That distinction matters for banks moving money across borders. A payment message can travel while the system needed to complete the underlying money transfer is closed. Without final settlement, banks must manage the intervening delay through prefunded liquidity or exposure to a counterparty. Pontes addresses how an asset and payment settle together; its operating schedule remains a separate constraint.
What Pontes changes
Pontes acts as an interoperability bridge between distributed-ledger technology, or DLT, platforms used for tokenised assets and the Eurosystem’s existing settlement services. Rather than requiring central bank money to reside natively on each market ledger, the arrangement links those platforms back to TARGET Services.
Scope Ratings says the bridge enables atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement in central bank money. “Atomic” means the asset transfer and payment are executed as an indivisible transaction, rather than one party completing its side and waiting for the other. Settling the cash leg in central bank money also avoids relying on commercial bank money or stablecoins for that part of the transaction.
The launch therefore addresses a specific settlement risk: the possibility that an asset changes hands without the corresponding payment being completed. It should not be read as a claim that the infrastructure is continuously open. Atomic execution describes how a transaction completes when settlement is available, not when it can be submitted for final settlement.
Why around-the-clock settlement remains out of reach
Pontes still depends on the operating hours of T2, the Eurosystem’s real-time gross settlement system. The research provided for this article describes T2 as operating for 22.5 hours on weekdays and closing on weekends. Pontes’ user requirements also mandate automatic end-of-day defunding: participants cannot hold tokenised central bank money balances overnight under that rule.
Those limits leave a gap between a tokenised transaction being ready and the central bank money needed to settle it being available. In conventional correspondent banking, banks may commit liquidity in sequence across time zones, hold funds in foreign nostro accounts ahead of a payment, or bear counterparty credit risk until a domestic settlement window opens. Around-the-clock messaging alone does not remove that gap. ISO 20022 messages carried through Swift can operate continuously, but a message is not the same as a final transfer of wholesale funds.
The Association of German Banks has also criticised Pontes’ interim bridge design as overly complex compared with distributing central bank money directly onto market DLT networks. Its objection concerns the route settlement takes, not whether the live bridge can coordinate an asset transfer with payment during available hours.
What Project Agorá tests instead
Project Agorá, convened by the Bank for International Settlements and the Institute of International Finance, explores a different approach: bringing tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves onto a shared programmable platform for wholesale cross-border payments. Its participants include seven central banks, among them the Bank of England, the Swiss National Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The project’s real-value testing phase involved 28 financial institutions and central banks across Asia, Europe and North America. They settled 30 cross-border transactions worth approximately CHF 800,000 across six currencies: the US dollar, euro, British pound, Japanese yen, Swiss franc and South Korean won. The BIS research also reports atomic settlement in as little as 80 seconds.
Under Agorá’s model, participating commercial banks must first lock liquidity for both the deposit and central bank reserve legs. Smart contracts then execute the linked transfers together or not at all. That design seeks to reduce the delays associated with sequential settlement while retaining the two-tier structure in which commercial banks issue deposits and central banks provide reserves. The tests demonstrate an approach to coordinating settlement; they do not establish that every cross-border payment can already settle continuously.
The Eurosystem’s timetable
ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone has said the Eurosystem plans to extend Pontes’ operating hours significantly by mid-2027 and reach 24/7/365 availability in 2028. It is also targeting immediate settlement finality on its DLT platform as early as 2027. These are planned milestones, distinct from the capabilities of Pontes at launch.
For now, the two initiatives illuminate different parts of the same problem. Pontes connects tokenised assets to central bank money through existing Eurosystem services, while Agorá tests whether a shared ledger can coordinate deposits and reserves across currencies. Neither eliminates the need to have liquidity in place when a transaction settles. The practical test for continuous wholesale settlement will be whether participants can achieve finality outside today’s domestic settlement windows without replacing the delay with trapped liquidity or bilateral credit risk.
The European Central Bank has launched Pontes, a bridge connecting tokenised-asset platforms to the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services for wholesale settlement in central bank money. The arrangement enables atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement, in which an asset and its payment move together. It does not yet make wholesale settlement available around the clock: Pontes depends on T2 operating hours and requires tokenised central bank money balances to be defunded at the end of the day. ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone says the Eurosystem plans to extend Pontes operating hours substantially by mid-2027 and reach 24/7/365 availability in 2028. Separately, the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Agorá has tested cross-border payments using a shared programmable ledger that brings tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves into a single settlement process. Both initiatives address delays and liquidity demands in wholesale payments, but neither makes continuous, cross-border settlement available today.
Project Agorá’s real-value testing settled 30 live, multi-currency transactions worth approximately CHF 800,000, with atomic settlement averaging about 80 seconds. The tests involved 28 commercial institutions and five central banks. The result shows how tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves could support faster cross-border settlement, though it does not establish that settlement latency has been eliminated. The project’s prototype found that tokenisation did not change the legal character or regulatory obligations of deposits and reserves. Its design also let participating institutions conduct compliance checks concurrently. Seven more commercial banks joined in September 2026, taking private-sector participation to nearly 50 institutions. At Sibos in October, banking executives described the testing pipeline as a step towards production trials alongside the European Central Bank’s Pontes platform. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York did not participate in the live test transactions, an important qualification for the US dollar tests.
Ripple’s final federal trust bank charter, a Moody’s investment-grade rating for RLUSD and a planned expansion of the stablecoin’s availability on Coinbase have strengthened its position as a regulated digital dollar. Coinbase said Global Exchange access, including eligibility to use RLUSD as trading collateral, will follow its initial retail and prime rollout. Moody’s assigned RLUSD an A2 long-term deposit rating and a P-1 short-term rating, the first investment-grade rating it has given a stablecoin. The distinctions behind those developments matter. Ripple National Trust Bank manages RLUSD’s reserve collateral, but the legal issuer remains Standard Custody & Trust Company, a New York-regulated Ripple subsidiary. The national trust bank is uninsured and cannot take commercial retail deposits or extend credit. Moody’s also noted that holders do not currently own the underlying reserves directly and that statutory bankruptcy protections depend on implementation of the GENIUS Act, whose rules take effect in January 2027.
Ramp partnered with Stripe and Bridge in July 2026 to deploy stablecoin rails for business bill payments and yield-bearing stablecoin accounts funded through standard fiat bank accounts. The arrangement shows how stablecoins can be incorporated into familiar payment workflows without requiring businesses to fund every transaction with digital assets. The economics depend on more than the cost of moving a token on-chain. Stripe charges merchants 1.5% for stablecoin checkout transactions, versus its standard card-processing fee of 2.9% plus $0.30; neither figure establishes the price of Ramp’s bill-payment service. Businesses receiving fiat may also face foreign-exchange and off-ramp costs, typically 0.3% to 2.0% when converting into local banking systems. Domestic clearing networks and compliance checks remain part of end-to-end delivery. Bridge’s issuance and transfer tools, alongside its conditional U.S. trust-bank approval, illustrate the infrastructure behind those payments—but not the elimination of every payment cost.
StraitsX has opened onboarding for digital payment token providers across more than 100 markets through an expanded card-issuing architecture developed with Visa. Integration documentation published on 26 October 2026 describes a multi-BIN model that combines issuing sponsorship, transaction authorization, compliance screening and fiat clearing. The approach lets participating providers build stablecoin-backed card products while merchants continue to receive conventional fiat payments through Visa’s network. StraitsX says its card gross transaction value rose 40-fold year on year from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025, while cards issued across Asia increased 83-fold. On-chain issuer telemetry recorded monthly card transaction volume of $310 million to $438 million through October 2026. The company’s stated $6 billion annualized card transaction figure is distinct from its cumulative $70 billion in processed stablecoin volume. StraitsX and Visa have also scheduled demonstrations of agentic payments for November 2026.
ACI Worldwide and Circle announced a pilot on October 27, 2026, involving USDC and connectivity to Colombia’s Bre-B instant payments system. The integration runs through ACI Connetic, a payments orchestration platform, rather than embedding USDC in Bre-B’s central infrastructure. There is no indication that Colombia’s central bank has adopted USDC as a settlement asset for the national network. The distinction matters because ACI also supplies technology for Bre-B’s central directory and real-time clearing engine. Bre-B launched in October 2025 and handled more than 500 million transactions within five months. Connetic is designed to bring traditional payment rails and digital asset networks together without requiring banks to replace legacy core ledgers. ACI says the platform can support other digital assets and liquidity providers, so the pilot does not make USDC its exclusive option. The arrangement tests a vendor-level connection alongside an established public payment system, not a change to that system’s settlement rules.