AEB CEO María Abascal today called for a coordinated response at the European level to harness the full potential of tokenization with the aim of modernizing and integrating financial markets so that they can meet all of Europe’s strategic needs.
“Tokenization and distributed ledger technology (DLT) can help modernize financial markets, reduce inefficiencies, and strengthen integration, liquidity, and European competitiveness,” he stated at the conference on digitalization and innovation in payments organized by the ECB and opened by its president, Christine Lagarde.
During her remarks, María Abascal emphasized that tokenization represents a strategic opportunity for Europe, not only from a technological standpoint, but also to address market fragmentation, improve capital allocation, and strengthen Europe’s ability to finance its strategic priorities.
He also noted that the main obstacle to moving this process forward is not technology, but funding, and he argued for the need to combine tokenized deposits and central bank money within DLT infrastructure to ensure secure and scalable settlements.
In this context, it has opted for a hybrid ecosystem in which public and private solutions coexist, with tokenized deposits serving as a natural evolution, central bank money on DLT acting as an anchor of stability, and stablecoins playing a complementary role in specific applications.
Abascal also warned that, without interoperability, common standards, and coordination, Europe risks replicating in its new digital infrastructure the inefficiencies resulting from the fragmentation that already exists in the current system.
For this reason, he has advocated for regulatory adjustments that prevent a loss of competitiveness (MiCA, DLT Pilot), a cash settlement infrastructure at the ECB, and an active role for the central bank as coordinator of the ecosystem, with the aim of moving from pilot projects to full-scale implementation and building an integrated, competitive system based on the euro.
