In the words of Yali Rothenberg, Accountant General at Israel’s Ministry of Finance, “I believe that blockchain-based technologies are here to stay, and over time will permeate the core of the financial markets, thoroughly and deeply altering them.”
Israel’s Ministry of Finance and Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) plan to perform live testing of tokenized government bonds.
The project, titled “Eden,” involves creating a blockchain-based platform for issuing and trading digital bonds. The government has enlisted asset custody provider Fireblocks and cloud computing firm VMware to aid in the functioning of the platform.
The aim of this venture is to facilitate the process of bond issuance by reducing costs and increasing transparency.
“The current project kicks off the journey into this new world, allowing a first and important foothold that will serve as the foundation for the upgrading of other traditional mechanisms down the road.”
According to local news outlets, digital bonds will be credited to participants’ e-wallets as part of the live test. In exchange, the recipients of the bonds will transfer an equivalent amount of digital currencies to the government’s e-wallet.
It is worth noting that the blockchain used for trading digital bonds will remain centralized for the time being.
However, Fireblocks claims the protocol is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This will allow the Israeli government to issue bonds using a public ledger (such as Ethereum) in the future.
