Overview

Shaping the Future of Capital Markets

How can Blockchain technology drive innovation in the world of securities and government debt in Israel?

Join us in the first Israeli technology hackathon to explore Blockchain solutions to both innovate and tackle challenges in infrastructure and architectures underlying the securities and sovereign debt markets in Israel, hosted by:

The Israel Securities Authority (ISA), the regulatory body of the securities market
Start-Up Nation Central, and
Start-Up Nation Policy Institute (SNPI)

We invite developers, researchers, product managers, marketing people, designers and legal professionals in the fields of distributed systems, finance, cryptography, and regulation to join us in this journey of innovation. Hackathon participants will gain access to state-of-the-art knowledge and technology stacks for use in their solutions.

We are happy to have the Government Debt Management Unit (from The Office of the Accountant General at the Ministry of Finance) as part of the hackathon. They encourage participants to challenge existing processes for the issuance and management of government debt.

Instructions

The hackathon venue is limited to 60 people, so we have set a selection process in place in the case we have more registrations.

Themes

We believe participants can challenge these three core components in our current system: Issuance of assets, Ownership and Reporting, as outlined below. More and more, leading financial institutions believe that simplifying the following processes will reduce the general risks and costs, as well as increase innovation:

digital assets process diagram

*Credit for the icons to icons8

Use of blockchain technology to improve the efficiency of Government Debt Issuance and / or use blockchain technology to improve the government bonds market efficiency and functionality.

Different asset types (stocks, bonds etc.) have different issuance and trading requirements, sometimes involving several different parties (CSD, Brokers etc.). This means that the originator of the asset does not usually have a direct channel with the investors / buyers, which complicates the minting and further processes. Learn More

Functionality around Ownership of Securities and Government Debt

Transfer of assets: is usually done through third parties, such as Clearing Houses, banks or other financial intermediaries, meaning that ownership is not transferred in “real-time”, as the clearing and settlement process can take up to several days. Market places (such as stock exchanges) are built on top of this transfer mechanism.

Proof of ownership: as part of an action related to the security, there may be a need for the participant to prove their ownership of the title, which grants the owner rights such as vote, collection of interest or dividends.

Voting shares distribution and execution: the distribution of voting tokens that acknowledge the right of ownership for the vote, can be implemented on the blockchain. Today, this process is not live, which can sometimes mean that voting rights can be held by parties that do not own the asset anymore at the time of voting.

Dividends and interest distribution: dividends (stocks) and interests or principal payments (bonds) are given to those who own the specific asset at a given point in time. In this case, a proportionate amount of funds (in ILS) needs to be transferred to the owner of the asset. The main challenge here comes from the disintermediation of the distribution, where neither companies nor the government usually have access to the end receiver of the dividends or interests.

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Data Reporting and Market Auditing

It is legally required that companies (and individuals) involved in capital markets (during several parts of the process) generate reports to be shared with the ISA to ensure the well-being of the market, allowing them to enforce regulation. Current systems generate hundreds of Gigabytes of data every month, making it difficult to share, analyze and secure the data. This can become a large resource overhead for the ISA and other involved parties.

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Prizes

Main Prizes

Hackathon Prize

ILS 10,000

The winning team will be awarded a cash prize and will have the opportunity to continue working on their project with support from the technology provider of the stack used and theme owner. The support includes product development, a proof of concept (PoC) and general advising for a period of at least a 3 months.

Shaping the Future of Capital Markets

Overview

Shaping the Future of Capital Markets

Instructions

Themes

Prizes

Help & Support