Digital Euro, Pontes, Appia: The 3 Projects the ECB is Advancing Simultaneously

This week in Frankfurt, three clocks are ticking at the same time. On Tuesday, the European Central Bank opened its call for applications to e-commerce merchants to test the digital euro. In five days, on September 21, its other project, Pontes, will go into production. And in the background, a third project, Appia, is already designing the architecture for 2028. None of this is a coincidence in timing: it is Frankfurt's coordinated response to the rise of dollar stablecoins.

Key points of this article:

• The European Central Bank has opened a call for applications to test the digital euro with e-commerce merchants.
• Pontes, an ECB project linking blockchain platforms to existing infrastructures, will go into production on September 21.

The digital euro for merchants: the ECB recruits for 2027

On Tuesday, September 15, the Eurosystem opened a call for expressions of interest for online and mobile merchants in the euro area, invited to join the pilot of the digital euro planned for the second half of 2027, according to the ECB's official statement.

Applications are expected before October 27 at 5 PM CET, with an information session scheduled for October 6. This 12-month pilot will test a beta version without legal tender, alongside the 36 payment service providers already selected in July, including Deutsche Bank, UniCredit, BPCE, as well as Revolut and Stripe, to validate payment pathways before a potential issuance in 2029.

Pontes: The ECB goes into production on September 21, without a safety net

Pontes does not settle for a pilot. According to the project's official page, this bridge between the blockchain platforms of the markets and the TARGET infrastructure of the Eurosystem will go into production on September 21. The term "pilot," used in the technical documents released in the spring, has quietly disappeared from the ECB's communication as the launch approaches.

Banks and central depositories will be able to settle tokenized deposits, commercial paper, and bonds directly in central bank money, through a cryptographic locking mechanism that synchronizes the delivery of the asset and its payment. The settlement finality will initially follow that of T2, the existing system. We reported on the ECB's on-chain pivot at the end of August: five months after Isabel Schnabel's announcement, the project is already in production.

Appia, the third front that no one sees coming

Then there is Appia, more discreet but no less ambitious, in continuity with the two-pronged strategy approved by the Governing Council as early as July 2025. This program aims to design by 2028 the target architecture of a unified European market for tokenized assets, with its technical standards and legal framework.

Taken together, these three projects address the same problem: euro stablecoins compliant with MiCA weigh less than $700 million combined, compared to over $300 billion for their dollar equivalents, with USDT and USDC leading the way. The banking consortium Qivalis, comprising about ten European banks including BNP Paribas and ING, aims for a private euro stablecoin for the second half of 2026, pending obtaining its license from the Dutch central bank. While Frankfurt fine-tunes its public plumbing, the private sector is not waiting for anyone.

Three timelines, one single September: this is rare enough to be noted. The ECB is no longer betting on a single project in the face of American stablecoins; it is aligning three at once, from public payment to interbank settlement to the market architecture of tomorrow. The regulatory aspect must keep pace: the regulation on the digital euro must still be adopted before the end of 2026 for the 2029 timeline to hold. "He who embraces too much, holds on to nothing," the proverb says. The ECB, however, has clearly decided to see if the rule suffers from exceptions.

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