FX market infrastructure adapts to multi-money settlement shift

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Highlights

From September, the Eurosystem will allow banks to settle tokenised asset platform transactions in central bank money, following Pontes tests covering 50 transactions worth 1.6 billion euros.
Projects like Agorá, mBridge, and synchronisation operator models advance toward commercial use, expanding tokenised deposits, CBDCs, and cross-border payments settlement options.
Despite the U.S. dollar's dominance in 89.2% of FX trades, rising EMDE currencies like CNH lack robust settlement support, creating opportunities for digital rails to improve interoperability and risk management.

Digital finance projects broaden settlement options

As reported by CLS Group, citing Sibos Insider, the article says the Eurosystem is opening a new channel from September for banks on tokenised asset platforms to settle transactions in central bank money through its payments infrastructure. In tests of the Pontes concept, participants completed 50 transactions worth 1.6 billion euros, underscoring how official and private-sector infrastructure is starting to connect more directly with digital asset activity.

Pontes sits alongside other programmes aimed at modernising cross-border payments and securities settlement. Project Agorá is exploring tokenised commercial bank deposits and CBDCs, while the mBridge platform is moving toward commercial adoption, and the synchronisation operator model is also shifting from experimentation into live use.

For wholesale FX, where average daily turnover exceeds $9 trillion, the article argues that speed alone is not the main objective. Any market evolution still needs to ensure that value moves safely between currencies while preserving settlement certainty and liquidity efficiency.

Interoperability and risk controls stay central

The spread of digital assets across payments and securities markets means FX participants increasingly face transactions that span different assets, networks and infrastructures. That creates operational, legal and market-structure challenges as much as technical ones, especially when both legs of a trade must settle simultaneously across separate ledgers.

The article says the U.S. dollar remains dominant, appearing on one side of 89.2% of FX trades and in all 10 most traded currency pairs, but it also points to rising traction for emerging market and developing economy currencies such as the offshore Chinese renminbi, CNH. While CNH has more than doubled its share of global FX turnover since 2019, support for fast-growing EMDE currencies in traditional payment-versus-payment settlement frameworks remains limited.

That gap may create a role for digital rails, not as a replacement for existing infrastructure but as a way to extend safer and more interoperable settlement beyond current coverage. In that environment, trusted financial market infrastructures remain central to managing risk, setting standards, supporting liquidity and coordinating public and private sector participants.

Our earlier coverage of Polymarket’s institutional expansion noted the platform’s push to attract professional trading firms by hiring former Goldman Sachs executive Lisa Mantil to lead institutional growth. We highlighted that the move follows Polymarket’s U.S. exchange launch and includes efforts such as exploring block trades to support larger liquidity, even as regulatory uncertainty continues to weigh on broader institutional adoption.

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