Avalanche has gained an indirect connection to Europe’s new tokenized-securities settlement infrastructure through Cashlink, one of the first distributed-ledger operators onboarded to the Eurosystem’s Pontes service. The link does not amount to an official ECB integration of Avalanche, but it places the network inside the regulated infrastructure of a company already authorized to connect DLT-based markets with central bank settlement.
The Eurosystem launched Pontes on September 21 as a bridge between eligible market DLT platforms and TARGET Services. According to the official ECB launch announcement, the initial DLT operators are Axiology, Cashlink, Clearstream and SWIAT. Avalanche itself is not named among those operators or as a directly integrated blockchain, making Cashlink the relevant intermediary when assessing its potential role in the new settlement framework.
Cashlink Connects Tokenization With Avalanche
Cashlink separately announced a strategic partnership with Ava Labs on August 31 to extend its regulated securities infrastructure to Avalanche. The company said financial institutions will be able to issue and manage token-based securities using Avalanche while Cashlink provides regulated registry and infrastructure services. That partnership brings Avalanche into Cashlink’s multichain capital-markets stack, but it does not establish that Avalanche-based securities are already settling through Pontes.
In the official Cashlink announcement, the company describes itself as a platform-neutral infrastructure layer connecting issuers, trading venues, custodians and settlement systems. Cashlink has processed more than €1 billion in transaction volume and supported more than 300 live issuances, according to the company. Its role as both a regulated securities infrastructure provider supporting Avalanche and an initial Pontes operator creates the technical and institutional pathway behind the Avalanche connection.
Pontes itself is designed around interoperability rather than forcing tokenized assets onto a single blockchain. The ECB says the system links eligible market DLT platforms to TARGET Services and supports delivery-versus-payment transactions through its Hash-Link synchronization protocol. The objective is to let tokenized securities settle their cash leg in central bank money while preserving the DLT infrastructure used for the asset side of the transaction.
Direct Avalanche Settlement Remains Unconfirmed
That architecture makes Avalanche technically relevant once regulated securities are issued through Cashlink, but the public evidence stops short of confirming a production transaction connecting Avalanche directly to Pontes. The ECB has not listed Avalanche as a Pontes network, nor has Cashlink published a transaction demonstrating an Avalanche-issued security completing settlement through the service. The current relationship should therefore be described as infrastructure adjacency with a credible interoperability path, not completed chain-level integration.
Pontes nevertheless marks a significant change in how European tokenized markets can settle. It supports central-bank-money settlement through T2 and a Eurosystem DLT-based cash-token model, while synchronized delivery-versus-payment is designed to make linked asset and cash movements complete on an all-or-none basis. The significance for blockchain networks is that institutional adoption increasingly depends on connectivity to regulated settlement infrastructure rather than blockchain performance alone.
Cashlink’s Avalanche partnership therefore becomes more consequential after Pontes’ launch, even without direct ECB endorsement of the network. The next concrete milestone will be an actual Avalanche-based issuance or transaction using Cashlink infrastructure and settling through Pontes, which would convert the current indirect relationship into documented operational interoperability. Until that happens, Avalanche should be described as supported by a Pontes-connected DLT operator rather than as an ECB-integrated network.