Bank of Israel
Digital Shekel
Selected by the Bank of Israel as one of 14 teams to develop use-cases for a potential digital shekel in its CBDC sandbox.
Read the report →Overview
QEDIT was selected by the Bank of Israel as one of fourteen teams to take part in the Digital Shekel Challenge, an initiative to develop use-cases for a potential central bank digital currency (CBDC) in a dedicated sandbox. The other selected teams included international companies such as Fireblocks, IDEMIA, and PayPal.
The challenge
The Bank of Israel has a long-running CBDC research programme. In 2024 it opened a sandbox for the private sector to build innovative use-cases on a technological prototype that models the core of the digital shekel system and its APIs. Entrants were given access to this API layer and tasked with developing services that payment providers could make available to the public.
Teams were chosen by an internal committee against criteria including innovation, fit with the needs of the Israeli economy, support for the central bank's stated motivations for a potential CBDC, how the API would be used to implement the solution, and breadth of diversity across the selected teams. The selected use-cases spanned three areas: connectivity between the digital shekel, other payment systems and cash; advanced functionality such as sub-wallets, conditional payments and split payments; and the use of various technologies with the digital shekel as a means of payment.
The sandbox began operating in August 2024, with a concluding conference in October at which the projects were judged and ranked. The Bank of Israel has stressed that no decision has yet been made to issue a digital shekel, and that the challenge is part of getting ready should issuance prove right and necessary.
Why it matters
Privacy is a central design question for any retail CBDC, and it is exactly the area where QEDIT's cryptography applies. Being selected alongside major global payments and identity firms placed QEDIT inside one of the most closely watched CBDC programmes, working on the kind of confidentiality and compliance problems that determine whether a digital currency can be both private and auditable.