🇪🇺URGENT: ECB launches “Digital Euro” for banks as Pontes begins a pilot of tokenized finance.
The President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, announces that the ECB is launching today Pontes, a platform that will connect private blockchain networks to the TARGET system, allowing banks to settle tokenized assets directly in central bank money.
“It's the digital euro made available to banks,” says the ECB, enabling institutions to carry out transactions using tokenized assets and DLT “more quickly, without friction,” it adds.
Pontes is the first step toward the ECB’s broader Appia ecosystem for tokenized financial markets, while tests of the digital euro for consumers are planned for mid-2027.
The reason isn’t better political prediction markets, but rather the distribution: Robinhood, Coinbase, Webull, and Moomoo offer Kalshi contracts, and what they promote in the “non-sports” category is mostly BTC, ETH, and S&P markets with hourly settlement. An hourly-period contract is opened and settled within up to 60 minutes; so the same capital generates new volume every hour, whereas a Fed decision with an outcome in November accounts for just one entry.
So the value of US$ 10 billion is real, but it looks more like short-term crypto-asset derivatives wearing a different outfit than a wave of people betting on elections. Follow *open interest* (open contracts) and long-term markets to see how much of this momentum will hold.
PAX Gold and Tether Gold are side by side in holder accounts, with 86.041 versus 78.189.
Over the last 30 days, PAX Gold grew 1.8% and Tether Gold 22.5%.
Dune tags each product with its instrument type, allowing you to compare a product with its real peers in terms of number of holders, growth, trading in the secondary market, and use as collateral in DeFi—not just by size.
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Trading Volume in Prediction Markets (Excluding Sports)
Trading volume in prediction markets not related to sports reached US$ 10 billion in the week ending September 13—up from US$ 2,7 billion reported on August 2, nearly quadrupling over six weeks and marking the sixth consecutive record. While sports still account for the largest share of the total, this is the segment that should represent the "real" use case: politics, macroeconomics, and cryptocurrencies.
The key detail is who is generating this volume. Kalshi accounted for US$ 9,6 billion of the total US$ 10 billion—96% of the category—an important reversal from June, when the competition was evenly matched, and from a year ago when Polymarket led the way.
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