Israel's stock exchange will launch a platform for digital assets

The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange will kick off a five-year strategy to develop a new platform for the trade of digital assets, the public stock exchange announced in a press statement.

"We see in the next five years a critical window of opportunity for the integration of the Israeli Stock Exchange in the technological revolution that the world's capital markets are going through," Itai Ben-Zeev, CEO of the exchange, said in the statement. Development of the strategy will start in 2023.

The program looks to bolster TASE’s value proposition by establishing a blockchain-based platform that integrates crypto, including “DLT technologies, tokenization of digital assets of various types and smart contracts.”

By implementing innovative technologies into its infrastructure, the exchange hopes to “strengthen the cooperation and the international profile of the stock exchange,” and notes that “these services and collaborations may include the purchase of holdings in foreign exchanges.”

The Israeli Ministry of Finance's Office of the Accountant General and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange announced last week that they will cooperate to test out digital state bonds — in an ongoing effort to institutionalize crypto in Israel. 

Israel is not the only jurisdiction seeking to digitalize financial instruments. In the European Union, the so-called DLT Pilot Regime is set to roll out in March. The sandbox experiment will encourage both traditional and new-arriving financial players to practice transacting tokenized securities.