ECB Outlines Three Models for Putting Central Bank Money Onchain

The significance is less in the models themselves than in the ECB formally treating onchain settlement as a design question rather than a hypothetical, which gives tokenized-asset venues a credible path to central bank money instead of stablecoin workarounds. The absence of a timeline or chosen model is the real signal: this is groundwork, not a launch, and it leaves commercial-bank and market-infrastructure providers guessing which architecture to build toward. Whether the ECB narrows to a single model, or lets institutions converge on one first, is the open question.