Pontes is live. The connection fee is the cheap part.
- Pontes
- DLT
- RWA
- Stablecoins
The Eurosystem's DLT settlement bridge went live on 21 September 2026. Joining costs €2,500. The real cost is the integration behind it: keys, liquidity, reconciliation and DORA.
On 21 September 2026 the Eurosystem switched on Pontes, the bridge that lets transactions on market DLT platforms settle in central bank money through TARGET. Thirteen market participants were onboarded on day one, from Deutsche Bank and Santander to KfW and the EIB, alongside four DLT operators: Axiology, Cashlink, Clearstream and SWIAT. More have committed to connect in the coming months.
The fees won't be what holds anyone back. A market participant pays a one-off €2,500 to connect, a DLT operator €15,000, and there are no monthly or settlement fees in the initial launch phase. What holds institutions back is everything that has to exist on their side of the interface before the first trade settles.
What Pontes actually does#
Pontes links market DLT platforms to TARGET services. The cash leg settles in one of two ways:
- Cash tokens on the Eurosystem DLT. Participants fund intraday cash tokens from their T2 account and settle against them. Whatever is left is defunded back to T2 automatically at end of day.
- Direct settlement in T2. The transaction is triggered from the Eurosystem DLT and the cash leg settles in T2 RTGS.
That covers delivery-versus-payment for tokenised securities, payment-versus-payment against commercial bank money or e-money tokens, and plain wholesale payments. Pontes doesn't ask market platforms for a particular chain or token standard. It asks them to lock an asset transfer conditionally until the cash leg is confirmed.
| Phase | When | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| Initial launch | Live since 21 Sep 2026 | Core services, euro only, intraday cash tokens, daytime settlement window |
| Initial enhancements | 2027 | Settlement finality on the Eurosystem DLT, all T2 currencies, hours aligned with T2 |
| Enhanced product | By mid-2028 | Overnight token holdings, 24/7 service, ongoing fees |
Two ways in#
| Market participant | Market DLT operator | |
|---|---|---|
| Who qualifies | Any entity with access to T2 | EU/EEA CSDs, DLT Pilot Regime systems, overseen payment systems, EMIR CCPs, and supervised banks or investment firms |
| Contract with | Your national central bank | Your national central bank |
| What you build | GUI or API access, signing keys, funding and defunding, reconciliation | API integration and conditional-lock (escrow) logic on your own ledger |
| Before go-live | Connectivity and certification testing | Connectivity and certification testing |
A participant can use Pontes for wholesale payments on its own. Settling securities or currencies against cash needs a registered DLT operator on the other side of the trade.
Where connections actually break#
The interface is well documented: one entry point with screen and API access, certificate and token authentication, signed instructions, and four-eyes approval on most actions. Getting a test case to pass is not the hard part. Running the connection inside a bank is.
- Keys and approvals. Instructions are signed. Those keys need an HSM, a custody policy, and a mapping from the Pontes approval and power-of-attorney model onto the entitlements you already run.
- Intraday liquidity. Cash tokens are funded from T2 and swept back every evening. Treasury needs that position in real time and a funding plan around the settlement window, or trades fail for want of tokens.
- Reconciliation. One trade now touches the DLT platform, the Eurosystem DLT, T2, and your core banking and custody books. Someone has to match all four every day and route each break to an owner.
- DORA. An internet-facing connection into a payment-critical system is an ICT risk item: register of information, incident classification, resilience testing. The Pontes documentation covers the interface. The DORA treatment is yours.
- The escrow, for operators. A platform joining as a DLT operator has to implement the conditional lock on its own ledger and pass its own certification cases without weakening the settlement guarantees it already gives its clients.
What the market is offering so far#
We read what has been published since launch. Three patterns stand out.
- Platforms offer Pontes access through their own venue. That works if you plan to trade there, and less well if you need a connection that serves several venues.
- Law firms cover classification, licensing and contracts. Necessary work, and it stops at the interface.
- Explainers describe the architecture. Most stop at the press release.
What's mostly missing is neutral integration engineering on the institution's side, scoped at a fixed price. Banks outside the euro area are missing from the conversation almost entirely.
If you're outside the euro area#
Eligibility follows access to T2, not euro membership. Several Czech banks already hold TARGET accounts through a euro-area central bank. Whether that route extends to Pontes depends on whether your central bank of access is onboarding participants, so that's the first question to settle.
Settlement is euro only for now, and the planned multi-currency step covers currencies settled in T2, which leaves out the koruna, the zloty and the forint. For a CEE bank that already moves euro through TARGET, Pontes is a euro wholesale capability, and a realistic one.
How we help#
We don't run a venue or sell a platform, so the connection we design is the one that fits your stack, not ours.
- Pontes Readiness Sprint. Fixed fee, two to four weeks. Which route fits you, participant or operator, and through which central bank. A gap map against the certification test cases. Target architecture for keys, liquidity and reconciliation. A DORA view of the connection. A build plan with a cost on it.
- Connection build. API integration with the Pontes entry point, HSM-backed signing, approval workflows, automated funding and defunding, and reconciliation into core banking and custody.
- DLT operator enablement. Conditional-lock logic on your ledger, including EVM and Hyperledger Besu stacks and ERC-3643 tokens, through to operator certification.
- Certification support. We work through connectivity and user testing with you and your central bank, case by case.
- Operations. Monitoring, end-of-day controls, reconciliation and the DORA evidence trail after go-live, as a managed service.
We have shipped on the EU's regulated rails before they had deadlines: an EU-Commission-backed bonds-on-DLT delivery on EBSI and Hyperledger Besu, and the risk layer underneath tokenized assets at RWArmor. We're based in Prague and work across CEE, where the access question is less obvious than it is in Frankfurt or Paris.
If you're an issuer rather than a bank, the ECB's plan to buy tokenised public-sector bonds via Pontes changes the question. See the ECB as buyer.
If Pontes is on your 2027 plan, start with a fixed-scope verdict on where you stand. That's what the readiness sprints are for, or write to us at info@prodevel.com.