Banque de France partners with Euroclear Bank on tokenized commercial paper project

The Banque de France, France's central bank, and Euroclear have jointly launched "Project Pythagore," a project aimed at tokenizing the European Union (NEU) commercial paper market, which currently has €310 billion in outstanding balances. The two parties plan to launch the pilot wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) in France by the end of 2026, when it will be implemented as part of the European Central Bank's "Project Pontes" wholesale distributed ledger technology (DLT) settlement system. France has previously experimented with using distributed ledger technology to process commercial paper, but while it advanced beyond the pilot phase, it ultimately failed to achieve widespread success.