The European Central Bank (ECB) is preparing a tokenized euro issued directly on blockchain infrastructure for wholesale use by banks and financial institutions, separate from its retail digital euro initiative. Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel presented the strategy at the Jackson Hole symposium, saying tokenized markets require a settlement asset only a central bank can create. The Eurosystem's Pontes project is scheduled to launch in September, linking market distributed ledger technology platforms with TARGET Services, the eurozone's real-time gross settlement infrastructure. It will support atomic settlement (transactions completing fully or not at all), initially keeping legal finality within T2 while allowing participants to settle with cash tokens on a Eurosystem ledger or complete the cash leg in T2. A May-November 2024 pilot involved 64 institutions across nine jurisdictions, settling nearly €1.6 billion in central bank money across 58 payment and securities settlement use cases. Schnabel said stablecoins (digital tokens designed to maintain a stable value) should complement rather than replace central bank money, retaining roles in liquidity provision, wallet transfers, remittances and access to decentralized markets. DeFiLlama estimated total stablecoin supply at roughly $304.6 billion in late August 2026, while euro-pegged tokens represented less than $1 billion. The planned tokenized euro could reduce stablecoin demand for tokenized bonds, funds, equities and repo transactions, but the ECB's trajectory leaves private tokens as a separate, complementary layer where portability, open access and cross-platform reach are more important than settlement finality. The parallel Appia project is due to determine the ECB's final architecture for digital solutions by 2028.