The European Central Bank held a conference on October 1, 2026, in London, focusing on digital money, tokenisation, and the future role of central banks in digital finance.
The European Central Bank (ECB) hosted a conference titled “The Future of Money” on October 1, 2026, at the Bank of England in London. Isabel Schnabel, a member of the ECB Executive Board, presented on topics including the potential of tokenisation to enable faster, safer, and smarter settlement processes, and its role in integrating European financial infrastructures.
The conference covered various aspects of digital money, including the use of programmable settlement, atomicity in transactions, and the integration of tokenised assets. Discussions also addressed how modern fiat monetary systems are built on a two-tier structure involving public and private settlement assets.
Additional topics included the ECB’s efforts to preserve the role of central bank money in a digitalised environment, the development of digital euro projects, and the potential for on-chain monetary policy implementation through tokenised reserves. The ECB also introduced the Pontes and Appia projects, which explore tokenised central bank money and different architectures for tokenised systems, including bridging solutions and interoperability layers.
The conference highlighted the ECB’s initiatives to modernise monetary infrastructure, including the launch of the Pontes project on September 21, 2026, which offers dual settlement models via TARGET2 and DLT, with planned enhancements such as 24/7 availability and decentralised programmability.
For more information, visit the official ECB press release: ECB Conference on the Future of Money.
