Fireblocks Among 14 Companies Chosen For The Bank of Israel’s Digital Shekel CBDC Challenge

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The Bank of Israel has announced the initiation of the “Digital Shekel Challenge,” an ambitious CBDC experiment inspired by “Project Rosalind” – a joint project by the Bank of England and BIS. The challenge aims to explore potential applications for a digital shekel system, garnering widespread interest from the fintech and finance communities both within Israel and internationally.

Participants in the Challenge include established financial institutions, fintech firms, technology companies, and independent teams from the private sector, public sector, and academia. The Bank of Israel has formed an internal committee to evaluate the proposals based on several criteria: innovation in the proposed use case, alignment with the needs of the Israeli economy, support for the motivations behind a potential digital shekel issuance, effective use of API functionality, and promotion of diversity among the contestants.

Selected use cases cover a range of innovative applications, including integration between the digital shekel, other payment systems, and cash; leveraging advanced functionalities such as subwallets, conditional payments, and split payments; and employing various technologies to facilitate payments using the digital shekel.

The Challenge will enter its sandbox phase at the beginning of August, providing the selected teams with the opportunity to develop their proposed use cases. The final products will be showcased at a concluding conference hosted by the Bank of Israel at the end of October.

The teams chosen to participate in the Digital Shekel Challenge are:

  • Bits of Gold
  • Brinks Israel Ltd. + Committed Digital Ltd
  • COTI
  • Credics Technologies LTD
  • Team Energy, led by Viacheslav Pozharskii
  • Fireblocks
  • Idemia France SAS
  • Kima Finance
  • Open Finance LTD
  • 0xPay
  • Paypal Israel LTD
  • Qedit
  • Shva
  • Team Levana, led by Doron Asor

Deputy Governor of the Bank of Israel, Andrew Abir, expressed his enthusiasm, stating: “I am pleased at the tremendous response to the Digital Shekel Challenge, and I thank the teams that have agreed to provide their time, resources, and capabilities to actively cooperate with us in the thinking, planning, and design of the digital shekel. We have learned quite a lot from the process thus far in building the Challenge and in discussions with the teams that have shown interest, and I am certain that we will learn much more from the case uses that will be developed by the selected participants. The digital shekel’s potential to create innovation in the payments array will depend on the private sector’s ability to leverage the platform that the Bank of Israel will build, which is what makes this Challenge so important.”

The Digital Shekel Challenge marks a significant step forward in the exploration and potential implementation of a digital currency in Israel, reflecting a collaborative effort to innovate and enhance the nation’s financial infrastructure.

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