Schnabel ties all three of her on-chain settlement models to central-bank reserves

The third model is the one closest to a stablecoin. A private intermediary holds reserves at the central bank and issues settlement tokens fully backed by them. The tokens are private claims, not central-bank liabilities, and the reserves stay off-chain ^[6]. So the ECB has left room for a private settlement token, as long as its backing is held at the central bank ^[6]. According to Crowdfund Insider, Schnabel's stated aim is to keep central-bank money as the settlement asset rather than leave the role "entirely to private instruments" ^[2].

The cash leg matters because of atomicity. In the slides' framing, the cash and asset sides of a trade complete together or not at all ^[3]. A venue can offer that only if the money it settles in can be reached from its own ledger ^[3]. Direct issuance does this by putting reserves on a central-bank-run platform as native tokens, held as a direct claim on the central bank ^[4]. The bridge leaves reserves untokenized in the real-time gross settlement system and links the two legs through triggers and hash links ^[5]. In two of the three routes, reserves never leave the systems that hold them today ^[1].

Pontes went live ten days before the London speech ^[2], pairing the bridge with a Eurosystem ledger ^[8]. Round-the-clock availability and more decentralized programmability are listed as later steps ^[9].

For anyone building tokenized-securities infrastructure, each route means different integration work. The bridge could become the default because it is running and asks nothing of the reserves. Venues would keep their own ledgers and wire triggers into TARGET2 ^[5][8]. If Appia, the longer-term project, settles on a single shared ledger ^[10], venues that built their own chains would have to move onto Eurosystem infrastructure. Or commercial banks could take the issuer seat in the third model, and the cash a venue sees on-chain would be a bank's reserve-backed token ^[6]. The presentation does not pick any of them as final ^[12].

I'd expect builders to plan against the bridge first. It has a launch date, and it lets a venue keep its chain while the cash stays inside Eurosystem systems ^[8]. The case against is Appia. A team that spends its next build cycle on bridge triggers may be writing code for a layer that a shared ledger later replaces ^[10].

The bank side changes less. In every route, commercial banks keep issuing customer claims that rest one-for-one on central-bank money ^[7][12]. That is the same two-tier split of central-bank and commercial-bank money that exists today, carried onto the ledger ^[7]. The view would be wrong if, once Pontes runs around the clock ^[9], euro tokenized-securities venues still chose private tokens without reserve backing for their cash leg.