on its central bank digital currency plans. It has received 33 responses from different sectors, with half of them coming from abroad and 17 from the domestic fintech community. While specifying that the final decision on the project’s fate is yet to be made, it claimed:
“All of the responses to the public consultation indicate support for continued research regarding the various implications on the payments market, financial and monetary stability, legal and technological issues, and more.” While the public reportedly believes that the digital shekel would encourage competition in the payments market, it is the privacy issue that once again emerged as controversial. The bank mentions that some commentators prefer the future currency to be fully anonymous while others insist that the fight against money laundering and the black market renders anonymity impractical.
"It feels like most digital shekel CBDC supporters are painting the topic as a broad-strokes adoption narrative. In other words, any crypto adoption is still adoption even if it doesn’t adhere to crypto’s core values like decentralization and anti-institutionalism." Mor noted that not everyone in Israel's digital finance sector shared the same vision. Yet he, himself, believes that"bringing crypto to the masses has to start with institutional and governmental involvement to some extent."