The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) has recently signaled its interest in exploring innovative use cases for distributed ledger technology (DLT) in financial markets.
Upon announcing its new strategy for the years 2023-27, TASE said that it would work to strengthen its digital, data and analytics offering, which will include creating new digital assets and developing a range of solutions and services for institutional investors and liquidity providers through the TASE Clearing House.
Related: Israel: At the Confluence of FinTech, Cybersecurity Innovation
The stock exchange anticipates blockchain and DLT would play an important role in the new strategy and suggested that it could convert existing infrastructure and develop new platforms to enable the tokenization of various classes of assets.
TASE has previously moved to perform a proof-of-concept pilot for the issuance of government bonds on a blockchain platform.
As announced last month, the blockchain technology company Fireblocks and the cloud infrastructure developer VMware have already been selected to participate in the pilot.
Read more: Blockchain, Crypto Firm Fireblocks Tops $100M Annual Recurring Revenue
The Rise of Blockchain Bonds
The prospect of issuing bonds as tokenized digital assets on a blockchain has gained traction in recent years. Governments, intergovernmental organizations and private financial institutions have all turned to DLT to streamline the issuance and exchange of debt-based securities.
One landmark example was pioneered by the World Bank, which began issuing debt in the form of “bond-i” bonds in 2018. Since then, the international financial institution has upped its platform’s capability by enabling secondary bond trading recorded on the blockchain for bond-i.
At the national level, Thailand and the Philippines issued blockchain-based bonds in 2020, and in both cases for bonds targeted toward retail investors. Poland has also used the technology to track the issuance of…
