The European Central Bank is studying three central bank currency on-chain solutions, including the tokenization of reserves

Foresight News, according to The Block, European Central Bank Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel The European Central Bank said at the Bank of England's Future Money Conference in London on Thursday that it is studying three ways to put central bank currency on the chain: one option is to let the central bank issue reserves directly on a programmable platform; another option is that the ECB's existing real-time gross settlement system will continue to be used and connect it to the distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform through an interoperability layer; the third option is to tokenize the reserves held by the central bank and issue settlement tokens fully backed by these reserves. According to its presentation, the tokens will be private claims rather than claims directly issued by a central bank.

Some 71% of senior decision-makers at the UK’s largest financial institutions expect tokenization to reshape the financial services industry, according to Lloyds Bank’s 10th annual Financial Institutions Sentiment Survey report provided to The Block. Faster payments and settlements were cited by 60% of respondents as the biggest potential advantage, followed by collateral and liquidity management at 41%. Some 77% of respondents said investing in emerging technologies is a growth priority, up from 41% in 2025.