Pontes, Tokenized Stocks, and the Race for Digital Money Rails | Monthly Briefing
Beschreibung der Episode
September brought two parts of digital finance into sharper focus: the money used to settle tokenized assets and the markets where those assets trade. The Eurosystem launched Pontes, connecting DLT-based wholesale transactions to central bank money. A group of 21 financial institutions advanced plans for a joint dollar stablecoin. In the United States, the SEC opened a conditional route for trading tokenized stocks after the CLARITY Act failed to advance in the Senate.
In this September news episode, Michael and Manuel Klein are joined by Anne-Sophie Gógl, Chairwoman of the Digital Euro Association and Digital Money Lead at KPMG Germany. They examine Pontes’s two settlement modes, the importance of legal finality in T2 and the ECB’s plan to invest a small portion of its own funds in tokenized public-sector securities. They also discuss the digital euro pilot’s search for online merchants and the Eurosystem’s proposals to revisit MiCA’s stablecoin reserve rules.
Beyond central bank money, banks and fintechs are building competing payment routes. The question is whether these networks will connect or create another set of isolated pools of liquidity.
Then the focus shifts to securities. Nasdaq’s planned $100 million investment in Payward, parent of Kraken, and the London Stock Exchange’s separate partnership with Payward bring crypto-native distribution closer to regulated market infrastructure. Coinbase’s stock-backed tokens on Base add a different model, with distinct legal rights and limits on who can use it. What happens to custody, shareholder rights and market oversight when a share can move through a wallet?
The episode also covers Bitcoin and Ether’s September rebound, ETF flows and the debate over Germany’s crypto holding-period tax exemption. Together, these developments show how the next phase of digital finance will depend on the design of the cash leg, the legal structure of assets and the institutions connecting the two.
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Knowledge Bite Michael: Paper of Bindseil et al. “The Multi-Issuance Issue" Knowledge Bite Anne-Sophie: Agentic payments: when payments learn to think; Monthly Report – September 2026 Knowledge Bite Manuel: DB flow article: Interview with Thomas Vlassopoulos, Director General Market Infrastructure and Payments at the European Central Bank (ECB): “Europe has a window of opportunity – but it will not be open forever”
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