Israel is accelerating the development of its central bank digital currency (CBDC), known as the digital shekel. The Bank of Israel (BoI) plans to collaborate with various service providers to create an advanced digital payments ecosystem centered on this currency. In a statement, the central bank announced the “Digital Shekel Challenge,” inspired by the “Project Rosalind” from the BIS Innovation Hub. Project Rosalind is a joint effort between the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Bank of England to develop prototypes for an application programming interface (API). The BoI will provide a sandbox environment with a layer of APIs