Fourteen Teams Have Been Chosen to Participate With the Bank of Israel in the “Digital Shekel Challenge”

On May 28, 2024, the Bank of Israel announced the “Digital Shekel Challenge” – an experiment inspired by “Project Rosalind”[1] carried out by the BIS Innovation Hub. In the Digital Shekel Challenge, the Bank of Israel invited teams from the private sector, the public sector, and academia to study the potential development of uses of a digital shekel system. The Challenge sparked significant interest within the fintech and finance communities both in Israel and abroad. The teams that proposed use cases in the Challenge represent veteran financial companies, fintech firms, technology firms, and private teams. The Bank of Israel established an internal committee to examine the proposals according to predefined criteria: innovation in the proposed use case; compatibility with the needs of the Israeli economy; the ability to support the motivations set forth by the Bank of Israel for the potential issuance of a digital shekel; how the API functionality (programming interfaces) would be used to implement the solution; and prioritizing broad diversity among contestants in the project. The use cases that were selected deal with a variety of fields: connectivity between the digital shekel, other payment systems, and cash; use of the advanced functionalities offered by the digital shekel, such as subwallets, conditional payments, and split payments; and the implementation of various technologies while using the digital shekel as a means of payment. The challenge’s sandbox will begin operating at the beginning of August, and will enable the selected teams to develop the use cases they have proposed. The products of the Challenge will be presented at a concluding conference that the Bank of Israel will hold at the end of October. The following is a list of the teams that have been selected to participate in the Challenge:

• 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

Bank of Israel Deputy Governor Andrew Abir said: “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.”