ECB's Schnabel urges central banks to issue money directly on blockchain networks

Schnabel Makes the Case for On-Chain Central Bank Money

European Central Bank Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel used her appearance at the Jackson Hole economic symposium on Friday to make a direct case for putting central bank money on-chain. Schnabel participated in a panel discussion at the 2026 Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Economic Policy Symposium, themed "Financial Innovation: Implications for Payments and Policy."

Speaking on a panel focused on payments and financial innovation, Schnabel argued that central banks should issue reserves natively on distributed ledgers, with smart contracts executing policy operations automatically. Her presentation highlighted that tokenisation allows settlement to be made conditional on a set of rules executed automatically, and that legs of a transaction can settle together or not at all, a property known as atomicity.

She was direct on the limitations of private alternatives. Stablecoins, she said, cannot play the settlement role that central bank money performs, because stablecoin issuers lack the ability to expand liquidity in times of stress. In practice, most stablecoins are not perfectly safe and face credit, liquidity and valuation risk. Schnabel has previously argued that stablecoins pose risks to financial stability and monetary policy, and that the ECB's best response is to ensure public money remains the anchor of the system.

Pontes: The ECB's Blockchain Settlement Platform

The remarks arrive as the @ecb prepares to launch its own concrete answer to the challenge. Pontes is the Eurosystem's distributed ledger technology solution that links market DLT platforms and TARGET Services to settle DLT-based wholesale transactions in central bank money. The go-live date is scheduled for 21 September 2026.

Pontes will serve as a connector, linking DLT-based market platforms directly to the Eurosystem's TARGET payment and settlement infrastructure, with the primary objective of ensuring transactions are settled in central bank euros rather than in commercial stablecoins.

Pontes is the first part of a dual-track strategy. It is designed to offer an interoperability solution in the short term, while the longer-term track, called Appia, will analyse possible designs for a more integrated solution. An enhanced version of Pontes is expected by 2028, designed to operate around the clock.

Schnabel's Jackson Hole intervention signals that the ECB views native issuance of central bank money on distributed ledgers not as a distant possibility, but as an institutional priority, with the infrastructure to back it already in the pipeline.

Sources
ECB: Pontes official page | Crowdfund Insider: Pontes and Appia go-live details | ECB: Schnabel Jackson Hole speech references