Euroclear Launches €300 Billion Tokenization Project with Banque de France

Euroclear's ambitious Project Pythagore aims to tokenize France's €310 billion Negotiable European Commercial Paper (NEU CP) market, a segment where large corporations and financial institutions issue short-term debt instruments.

The project would use Euroclear's own DLT platform for issuance and settlement, with the Banque de France providing wholesale CBDC rails for cash leg transactions. This is not a pilot phase with small amounts of test bonds but an attempt to migrate Europe's largest short-term debt market onto distributed ledger technology.

Jørgen Ouaknine, who leads digital asset strategy at Euroclear, believes that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will win the settlement race in wholesale financial markets due to their ability to eliminate counterparty risk. He also stated that no single blockchain will dominate finance, and multiple interoperable blockchains will coexist.

Project Pythagore is a significant development as it targets an entire asset class, which Euroclear processes over $1 trillion in securities transactions daily across traditional markets. The pilot phase is targeted for late 2026, timed to coincide with the Eurosystem's Pontes solution, which bridges DLT platforms with the European Central Bank's existing TARGET services.