Keynote speech by Piero Cipollone, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at an event on “Building Europe’s integrated digital asset ecosystem: from vision to implementation” hosted by the House of the Euro

Brussels, 23 March 2026

Over the past few years, tokenised capital markets in Europe have moved from exploration to production. According to recent estimates by the Association for Financial Markets in Europe, European issuers have placed close to €4 billion in fixed-income instruments based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) since 2021, including the first digital sovereign debt issuances by EU Member States.^[1] This comprises the Eurosystem’s 2024 exploratory work, in which participants across nine jurisdictions conducted transactions worth roughly €1.6 billion, including in trials that involved real settlements in central bank money and experiments that tested new use cases through mock transactions.

Tokenisation is the process of issuing or representing…