HIGH SIGNAL NEWS

• Germany’s Sparkassen to offer crypto trading by 2026. The country’s public savings banks will offer access to regulated crypto assets via the Sparkasse app by mid-2026, using DekaBank’s infrastructure. Implementation is planned within twelve months, but the group will not actively promote or advise on crypto investments.🇩🇪 

• Swiss National Bank extends Project Helvetia wholesale CBDC pilot. The SNB will continue testing wholesale CBDC on SIX Digital Exchange through mid-2027 as part of Project Helvetia. The extension doesn’t imply a permanent rollout.🇨🇭

• Korea pauses CBDC project as banks pivot to stablecoins. The Bank of Korea has paused Project Han River after pushback from major banks, which now plan to issue stablecoins under new government rules.🇰🇷 

• Circle applies for U.S. national trust bank charter. The stablecoin issuer has applied to the OCC to establish a national trust bank — a move that could open access to a Fed master account. It would let Circle directly hold its reserves and offer custody for tokenized assets like stocks and bonds to institutional clients.🇺🇸 

TOKENIZATION

Clarity with caveats: The European Central Bank has unveiled a dual-track strategy to enable wholesale settlement of tokenized assets in central bank money. The announcement marks the clearest signal yet that the ECB considers DLT a relevant market infrastructure. But the message comes with a caveat: the first implementation won’t arrive before Q3 2026.

Following the ECB trials: The new strategy builds on last year’s large-scale trials, where 64 institutions tested three approaches to settling tokenized assets in central bank money moving nearly €1.6 billion across separate systems. While technically successful, none of the solutions were selected as-is. Instead, the ECB chose a composite approach.

Two-track strategy: Rather than picking a winner, the ECB opted for a dual-track model:

• Pontes (short term): A trigger-based solution linking DLT platforms to the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services, scheduled for pilot launch in Q3 2026.

• Appia (long term): A forward-looking initiative to develop a fully integrated wholesale CBDC infrastructure which is designed to support programmability, atomic settlement, foreign exchange, and cross-border use cases within a harmonized European framework.

A clear direction, but a long wait: The dual-track model offers welcome clarity to institutions building tokenized infrastructure. But the timeline is slower than expected.

• “This will provide the market with planning certainty it has been seeking,” says Dirk Kruwinnus, Strategy Lead for Digital Assets and Tokenized Securities at Boerse Stuttgart Group. “Even if it comes later than the market might have hoped, the key takeaway is: DLT use cases will have a path to central bank money.”

Why the delay? Pontes was initially expected to go live in early 2026, but has now been pushed to Q3. Sources close to the process say the delay stems from the ECB’s decision to merge elements from all three tested systems rather than selecting one.

A political compromise: The three central banks behind the pilots played distinct roles:

1. Germany’s Trigger Solution was seen as the most mature and closely aligned to act as a bridge with TARGET infrastructure.

2. France’s DL3S featured a full DLT-based architecture and was positioned as a longer-term option.

3. Italy’s Hash-Link was considered less central, acting as a lightweight connector to TIPS.

Instead of choosing a single route, the ECB opted to blend the three — a decision interpreted by insiders as more political than technical.

Opportunities for alternatives: For financial institutions building tokenized capital markets infrastructure, the 2+ year gap creates an opportunity for other forms of digital money to flourish.

• “If the central bank takes too long to deliver its CBDC, banks may be tempted to temporarily turn to stablecoins as an alternative for cross-border and B2B payments, as well as for settling certain tokenized asset transactions onchain,” a senior executive at a Top 5 European bank tells Blockstories.

The big picture: With the notable exception of the U.S., most central banks are now actively shaping the future of financial infrastructure. Just yesterday, the Bank of England laid out its long-term vision: a financial system where tokenized assets, new forms of money, and modern settlement rails coexist with legacy structures.

• “It is time to move away from talking about potential and one-off demonstrations […] and start working together to deliver a new generation of the financial system,” said Sasha Mills, Executive Director for Financial Market Infrastructure.

Victoria Jahn is the Head of Regulatory Affairs at 21X, a regulated, blockchain-based exchange operating under the EU’s DLT Pilot Regime.

The ECB’s dual-track strategy is a welcome signal. It shows that central bank money onchain is no longer just a thought experiment. For the first time, all major EU institutions — from the Commission to the ECB — are aligned behind DLT.

But to turn that alignment into real-world progress, it’s essential that all participants have equal access to the proposed solutions, thereby recognizing their individual business models and needs.

In the longer term, interoperability should be a design principle from day one — especially as more institutions experiment with issuing, trading, and settling on public blockchain networks. Such an approach would help central bank money integrate smoothly with the broader digital-asset ecosystem that is already taking shape.

Jonathan Leßmann is the CMO at SWIAT, a blockchain infrastructure provider that played an active role in last year’s ECB trials.

From our perspective, the experimentation phase was a clear success. Many institutions allocated resources. There are three key innovations we see emerging from the ECB’s trial: 1) Intraday repo opportunities (new liquidity management), 2) decentralized DvP (no intermediary) and 3) synchronized liquidity operations (atomic settlement).

The ECB’s two-track approach, with Pontes short-term and Appia long-term, is a smart way to maintain momentum without waiting for a system with all desired features. We consider the open communication and announcement extremely valuable, because this allows the entities to plan and budget within their usual processes.

Central bank money will remain the gold standard for institutional transactions; however, for other use cases other forms of money will have increasing relevance. After this, the next step for digital assets will be ECB eligibility.

TOKENIZATION

One of the most striking takeaways from the RWA Summit in Cannes was how matter-of-fact the sentiment had become: as a financial institution, of course you’ll (also) need to build on public chains. That’s where global access, scalability, and the fastest pace of innovation are found.

This shift is creating powerful new flywheels: tokenized assets attract more tokenized assets, all benefiting from 24/7 settlement, composability, and programmability. You can see the beginnings with Apollo, VanEck, Janus Henderson, and others bringing their fund products onchain and actively engaging with crypto-native capital.

But there’s still a gap. Asset managers are leaning into DeFi. Banks still seem less interested. The RWA Summit made that visible, too: investor-heavy rooms, few banks, and near-total absence of European institutions. When the value proposition is global distribution, asset managers have the edge. Banks, with their focus on regulatory boundaries and balance sheet control, are moving on a different timeline.

• BNP Paribas: Operational Risk Officer - Digital Assets, Lisbon 🇵🇹

• Bunq: Head of Growth: Crypto & Stocks, Amsterdam 🇳🇱

• Citi: Digital Asset Product Director, London 🇬🇧

• Coinbase: Head of Operations, Luxembourg 🇱🇺

• Ripple: Client Solutions Director, Enterprise, Geneva🇨🇭 / London 🇬🇧

• Taurus: Trading Sales & Distribution Executive, Geneva🇨🇭 / Lausanne🇨🇭 / Zurich🇨🇭

• Thunes: Product Lead - Digital Assets, Paris 🇫🇷 / London 🇬🇧
  

Disclaimer: The information provided in the Institutional Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.