Speech by Piero Cipollone, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at the Deutsche Bundesbank’s Symposium on “Future of payments: trends and innovations in Germany and Europe”^[1]

Frankfurt am Main, 26 August 2026

Two years ago, at this very same Symposium, I argued that Europe had a unique opportunity.^[2]

Tokenisation and distributed ledger technology, or DLT, were beginning to reshape financial markets. By representing and transferring assets in the form of programmable data files – tokens – they offered the prospect of making finance more efficient, enabling it to operate around the clock with greater automation and fewer intermediaries.

At the heart of this transformation lies a Copernican revolution. Tokenised assets will be at the centre of a new digital finance ecosystem that allows issuers, investors and intermediaries to think anew and innovate.

But this transformation also poses a risk: a proliferation of incompatible platforms could reproduce, or even deepen, the…