TL;DR
The European Commission, ECB and ESMA are seeking experts for the European Tokenisation Standards Group, with applications closing November 27 and work expected to begin in January 2027.
The group will develop standards for holding and settling tokenized securities across DLT and traditional infrastructures, targeting Appia-related standards by early 2028.
Members will also monitor adoption and may recommend measures encouraging compliance, aiming to reduce fragmentation across Europe’s tokenized financial markets.
The European Commission, ECB and ESMA are seeking experts to join the European Tokenisation Standards Group, or ETSG. According to the official announcement , applications close November 27, with work expected to begin in January 2027. The group’s central task is to create common standards for holding and settling tokenized securities across DLT and traditional infrastructures. The initiative addresses interoperability challenges surrounding real-world asset tokenization as Europe tries to prevent blockchain markets from reproducing fragmentation.
ETSG Targets a Single Rulebook for DLT Settlement
The ETSG will be led by market participants, while the Commission, ECB and ESMA participate as observers. Eligible candidates include EU associations, private entities, global institutions, fintech companies and technical providers working on tokenization or DLT-based financial services. Applicants must bring standardization expertise, maintain a European presence and commit resources to the group’s work. The institutions also want balanced representation across geography and stakeholder types, reflecting the push for interoperable European tokenized markets .
The group will define where standardization is needed, catalogue initiatives, identify gaps with legacy-market standards and develop common market rules. Its mandate focuses on interoperability between DLT infrastructures and between DLT and conventional systems. The goal is not to create another isolated blockchain framework, but to make tokenized financial instruments easier to hold and settle across infrastructures. Initial standards relevant to the Eurosystem’s Appia roadmap are targeted for early 2028, with progress reported to European authorities.
The initiative includes a compliance layer. The ETSG is expected to develop a framework for monitoring whether agreed standards are used and may recommend measures that EU authorities could adopt to encourage compliance. That gives the industry-led group a role beyond technical design, extending into implementation and market adoption. The work intersects with efforts to test tokenized collateral and settlement resilience as regulators examine DLT assets within financial-market safeguards.
The standards effort sits alongside proposed changes to the EU DLT Pilot Regime and the Eurosystem’s Appia initiative. European institutions argue that incompatible networks and operating models could recreate silos rather than integrated markets. By bringing financial institutions, fintech firms and technical providers into one standards process, the ETSG aims to reduce fragmentation before tokenized securities scale further. Applications close November 27, and the group is expected to start work in January, adding another layer to Europe’s blockchain settlement infrastructure .
