The ECB presents Appia, the new infrastructure for integrating tokenized euro payments

A new Via Appia for Europe's single financial market is on the way. It is an ecosystem built on DLT (distributed ledger technology) with payments also in 'tokenized' euros: a special technological circuit that will reduce costs and increase the speed, efficiency, and reliability of financial transactions by making possible trading, clearing, settlement, custody, and related services in a single 'coded file' on a single platform available 24/7, 365 days a year.

This is the cutting-edge project, named Appia after the first and most important of the great roads built by the Romans (also known as regina viarum) for which the ECB today announced a roadmap. Appia will be realised through a public-private partnership that aims to involve all interested financial operators and stakeholders, from banks to funds, from fin-tech to the European Commission, to name but one example.

For some years now, financial market participants have been exploring the potential of new technologies, such as tokenization and distributed ledger technology (DLT), to improve the efficiency of securities trading and settlement infrastructures. If the Eurosystem were to delay offering central bank money in tokenized form for DLT, the euro area and all of Europe would run the risk of this new ecosystem developing outside of Europe or adopting non-euro-denominated means of settlement, damaging European monetary sovereignty.

The European Central Bank is therefore in step with the times and has been working on the Appia project since 2024. After an initial experimental phase, with pilot tests involving 64 operators and 1.6 billion tokenized transactions on the DLT platform, the ECB Governing Council decided to go ahead with Appia in 2025 and 'Pontes', which will literally be a bridge between the current system and the future one. The roadmap presented today is the first milestone for Appia. It will be followed in September by the launch of Pontes, which will go live allowing the use of the tokenized euro on existing DLT.

At the heart of the project is a further evolution of the central bank currency. The euro is already in digital form for wholesale markets but will become a tokenized currency (expressed in special codes) for use in DLT systems (which rely on technologies such as blockchain). In order to technologically advance central bank money from digital to tokens, the ECB does not need an ad hoc regulatory framework and regulation by the European Parliament and the European Council, as is necessary for the digital retail euro.