Speech by Isabel Schnabel, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium on “Financial Innovation: Implications for Payments and Policy”

Jackson Hole, 28 August 2026

It is a great pleasure to discuss Darrell Duffie’s paper “Tokenized finance and the perimeter of central banking” at this year’s Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium.^[1]

Tokenisation in wholesale finance has emerged as one of the most promising applications of distributed ledger technology (DLT), allowing financial assets and money to be represented as digital tokens on programmable platforms.

The potential benefits of tokenisation are substantial. This is particularly true for the euro area, as tokenisation presents an opportunity to foster integration by enabling assets and settlement to operate on common infrastructures.

However, as Darrell argues, the take-off of tokenised finance has so far partly been held back by the lack of a safe settlement asset. His paper…