The era of on-chain finance? Opening remarks by Mícheál O'Keeffe, Director of Policy and International at Blockchain Ireland Summit 2026

Introduction

Good afternoon everyone.

Thank you, Paul and Lory, for the invitation, and thank you to Blockchain Ireland and TEDx Dublin for putting this afternoon together – it really is quite the lineup.

So – as the summit was pitched – we are here today to explore how the new era of digital on-chain finance has the potential to bring speed, security, innovation, opportunity and resilience to one of our oldest inventions: money.

Speed that transforms settlement, security that protects assets, innovation that brings new business models, opportunity that democratises access, and resilience that reduces counterparty risk.

You’ve picked a big topic, Paul. But a really important one.

It is a topic close to our hearts – and our jobs – at central banks.

Many of you in the audience will engage with the Central Bank as your supervisor or through our regulatory policies. But our core job in central banks is to help ensure that money is trusted, retains its value over time, and can function reliably throughout the economy.

So I really am delighted to be able to share some perspectives from my “view of the forest” here today.

What is Money, Really?

Maybe a good place to start is the question: what is money?

Money is more than notes or coins in your wallet, more than numbers in your bank account.

Money is trust, money is exchange, money is settlement.

For a shared system of trust, partnership between the public and private sector is needed to ensure the monetary system can meet its public policy objectives.

Looking back through the ages, this is how I think today we should interpret Aristotle’s account of money as a convention that represents “shared need” or Georg Simmels description of it as “confidence in the social order”.¹

We are reminded that money is “trust made tangible”.²

Central banks have a pretty unique role in that system.³

The monetary system needs a stable foundation provided by public money, that is flexible enough to facilitate innovation, competition, interoperability, but also respond to the macroeconomic needs of the economy.

We provide an anchor of stability to the system through central bank money.

We ensure money moves safely, through central bank infrastructures and we maintain oversight of the payments system.  

We preserve safety and soundness and important consumer protections through monitoring, regulation, and supervision.

Private money derives its trust from largely two things - being able to exchange it at par with public money, and due to the regulation and supervision of the providers of private money, to keep them safe and sound.

Ultimately, regardless of technology, trust in money, and indeed trust in the euro, rests on monetary and financial stability and the rule of law in Europe.

On-chain finance is a really exciting horizon for money and for financial services.

Done well, the deployment of DLT and tokenisation in financial services could have tangible benefits for consumers, markets and the integrity of the system.

It might fundamentally alter how money moves, how assets are exchanged and how transactions are settled.

But, these are not inevitable outcomes from the deployment of new technology – they require enablers and safeguards to ensure the efficiencies and innovation are realized and further fragmentation is avoided.⁴

Today I want to set out where Central Bank of Ireland stands on tokenisation and on-chain finance.

I’ll share what firms have told us through our Discussion Paper on tokenisation and DLT, and how we’ve improved the way we work with innovators, including on AI.

Central Bank Money On-Chain

Before jumping straight in to central bank money on-chain, it’s probably worth explaining why a “settlement asset” matters.

In technical terms, a settlement asset is a financial claim accepted by a beneficiary to fully discharge a payment obligation.

Once the settlement asset changes hands, the obligations between the buyer and seller are officially fulfilled and considered final and legally irrevocable.

But let’s step back from the technical for the moment.

Financial markets, as I see it, are ultimately “networks of promises”.⁵

A settlement asset is what allows those promises to be discharged.

Every financial system needs a way to bring obligations to an end.

Without settlement finality, the entire architecture and the entire promise of tokenisation doesn’t work.  

Without on-chain cash, tokenisation is just a faster, digital ledger of ownership.

With safe on-chain cash, it has the potential to become an automated, friction-free financial transaction.

So tokenisation offers a lot of promise.

Tokenisation could let settlement that takes days happen in seconds.

It could let more people own smaller shares of assets that are hard to divide today.

It could build rules into the instrument itself, instead of checking compliance after the fact.

But for tokenised financial assets to settle efficiently, there must be a corresponding form of safe wholesale tokenised money.

Our engagements and research suggests that it is the availability of central bank money as the settlement asset in the tokenised ecosystem that will allow tokenised transactions to scale and ensure many of the benefits of the technology can be realised.

This is where Eurosystem initiatives become critical.

The safest and most liquid settlement asset is central bank money.

If we are thinking about how we can design an on-chain financial system, having a monetary anchor is critical.

The Pontes project will provide a near-term solution.⁶

For the longer-term, we – as part of the Eurosystem - have the Appia initiative, which aims to shape the development of the European tokenised financial ecosystem that can deliver monetary and financial stability; efficiency and automation, and market integration.  

Together, Pontes and Appia are central to tokenised assets moving to scale across Member States in the EU.

Money works best when it can change hands on a no-questions-asked basis. Nobody checks who issued the euro in their pocket before they spend it.⁷

All of those benefits we think of depend on trust.

That is why the two-tier structure of money matters: central bank money anchors the system; private innovation builds upon it; the architecture holds.

You might ask - won’t on-chain finance fragment into competing platforms? Yes, that’s a possibility – so we need to focus on building interoperability from the start.

If on-chain finance splits into separate platforms that cannot settle with each other, tokenisation will not deliver on its potential and instead increase fragmentation in the financial system.

What are consumers telling us?

Our household research, found that when people choose how to pay, they rank security, reliability and protection from fraud above speed and cost.

Weak safeguards will affect customers’ trust much greater than faster settlement times.

Firms building payment and tokenised products should design for that order of priorities, inform how you innovate and indeed what you are innovating towards.⁸

So as “money” changes, central banks are modernising to keep pace.

But here is what must not change: the things that make money useful in the first place – confidence in its value, acceptance in payment, and certainty in settlement.

DLT and Tokenisation – What We Are Hearing

In March we published a discussion paper on DLT and Tokenisation in financial services.

This allowed us to explore this area in depth, test ideas and present tokenisation through multiple perspectives.

We see many potential benefits for tokenisation in finance.

But these benefits will not be delivered by technology itself.

They rely on a number of enabling factors. Indeed, if these enabling factors are not there, and the system moves towards tokenised finance at greater scale, the risks could grow.

So we asked how DLT could change the underlying infrastructure of finance, what opportunities, enablers, challenges and risks it brings, and how the benefits of efficiency, transparency and access can reach society as a whole?

We looked at this through the lenses of asset tokenisation in markets and funds and the evolution of payments, money and settlement on-chain.

We received a really broad range of submissions, and held valuable engagements.

The breadth and depth of respondents matters because tokenisation affects different parts of the financial system in different ways.

Responses repeatedly pointed to a common set of dependencies that will shape the development of tokenised finance: legal certainty, regulatory clarity, interoperability, identity, governance, accountability, risk management, and central bank money as a core foundation of trust and resilience

These are not separate challenges – they are interconnected.

Take legal certainty, which operates as a connected chain, rather than isolated points.

Firms told us that settlement finality, ownership recognition, smart contract enforceability and cross-border legal recognition must align for tokenisation to work.

Without clear legal standing for on-chain registers, firms will need to maintain parallel off-chain records, which negates the efficiency benefits tokenisation is supposed to deliver.

This is a system-wide transition, and no individual market participant can achieve this on their own.

From a regulatory perspective, we saw consensus on the need to adapt and evolve existing frameworks rather than creating new ones.

Tokenisation and traditional finance will co-exist.

We need to continue the dialogue and open exchange.

Regulation does not exist in isolation, after all.

We value continued engagement with you as we develop our thinking to support innovation in tokenisation and financial services more broadly that deliver benefits for society as a whole.

How We Engage: The Hub and Sandbox

Our Innovation Hub has been working with innovators since 2018 and it is busier than it has ever been.

Last year we had a 10 per cent increase in engagements, and we’re well on track to pass that again this year. That growth tells us something: firms want to talk to us early; and we want to hear from them.

Alongside our Hub, our second Innovation Sandbox, on innovation in payments, brought together firms working on stablecoin infrastructure, account-to-account payments and financial inclusion.

One of its problem statements was the safe integration of emerging payment technologies, which is the work many firms here are doing.

And of course DLT and tokenisation are not the only technologies reshaping finance.

AI is already shaping the advice people receive, the credit and insurance decisions made about them, and how firms detect fraud and support customers in difficulty.

Through the next Sandbox, we intend to work with participating firms over several months on the questions we all need to answer as this technology develops. This links directly to today’s theme.

AI agents will soon be able to hold a wallet, read a smart contract and settle a payment without a person approving each step.

When they do, we will ask the same questions we ask of anyone providing financial services:

• Who is accountable?
• Can the firm explain what happened?
• Is the consumer protected if something goes wrong?

Innovation without accountability is not responsible innovation, it is experimentation with other people’s money.

Ireland can be a place where the further digitalisation of financial services is built responsibly, with the interests of consumers built from the start.

That happens through collaboration, through open engagement and an ecosystem that shares what it learns.

The On-Chain Age and public-private partnership

For the Central Bank, on-chain finance means engaging with firms before products launch, setting out our thinking while it is still developing, and changing how we work when the evidence supports it.

Our discussion paper, the Hub and the Sandbox are part of how we do that.

So I have three asks of the firms in this room.

• First, build for interoperability. A tokenised asset is more useful when it can move and settle across platforms. Engage with initiatives like Pontes, come together and create the ecosystem that could deliver on the promise of this technology.
• Second, settle in money people can trust. The future landscape will be made up of a variety of different forms of money and settlement assets, serving different purposes. Trust is the anchor in the financial system and customers need to know what they hold, that they have access to it and that they can get their money back.
• Third, talk to us early, while the design can still change. Fixing a product after launch costs far more than getting it right at the start.

Our aim is to reduce fragmentation, realise efficiencies and see on-chain finance meet the needs of the economy and society as a whole.

Conclusion

Money has changed form many times.

Each new form succeeded once it earned the trust of the people using it, and on-chain finance will be judged the same way.

Not by its speed, not by its elegance, not by its innovation – but by its trustworthiness.

If, as Simmel argued, money embodies confidence in the social order, then the challenge of on-chain finance is to carry that trust into new forms through clear rules, accountable institutions and reliable settlement.

What is crucial is that we get the legal and regulatory environment right.

That is clear from the feedback we received but also through our extensive work engaging in EU and international fora, looking at tokenisation across the globe.

But the industry has to do its part, working together for the entire system to adapt in a way that avoids a fragmentation of finance.

Looking ahead, we have further work planned on DLT and tokenisation.

Look out for our forthcoming publication in the coming weeks where we will feedback on what we heard from respondents to our discussion paper and signpost our next steps

Modernising the financial system will inevitably take time.

It is a collaborative effort, building a better system for the future.

I will leave it to this colourful cast of TEDx speakers to debate the details of how that’s going to happen.

Thank you and I’m looking forward to the interesting speakers that follow.