Three ways to put reserves on a ledger

Speaking at the Bank of England's Future of Money conference in London, ECB Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel laid out three architectures for bringing central bank money on chain. The framing is conservative: tokenisation is presented as a way to preserve the anchor role of central bank money in a digitalised world, not to replace the structure around it.

• Direct issuance: reserves are natively tokenised on a programmable platform run by the central bank.
• Bridging or synchronisation: reserves stay off chain in the existing real-time gross settlement system, with an interoperability layer linking it to DLT platforms by hash and trigger.
• Private intermediary: an intermediary tokenises reserves held at the central bank and issues settlement tokens fully backed by them, which are private claims rather than claims on the central bank.

What the three share is the two-tier shape of modern money, in which public settlement assets sit above private ones at one-to-one. Schnabel's slides argue that a tokenised system can replicate that structure provided central bank money is available on chain, with tokenised deposits settling against tokenised wholesale central bank money in the relationship that holds between them in the existing system.

The case for the move rests on two properties of tokenisation rather than on the technology in general: programmability, which lets settlement be made conditional on rules that execute automatically, and atomicity, which makes the legs of a transaction settle together or not at all.

This is not only a sketch. The presentation records that the Eurosystem's Pontes project launched on 21 September 2026, combining a bridge to TARGET2 with a Eurosystem DLT platform so that DLT-based transactions can settle in tokenised central bank money, with 24/7 availability and decentralised programmability listed as planned enhancements. A second project, Appia, is exploring the wider architectural question of whether the end state is a single unified ledger, interconnected networks or multiple shared ledgers.