Israel’s Chief Economist Introduces New Guidelines for Crypto Regulation

• Shira Greenberg proposes an extensive regulatory framework to oversee the crypto industry.
• Israel should strengthen assurance and protection to the investors, as per Greenberg.

The Israeli Finance Ministry brings new recommendations to regulate and oversee the crypto industry within the country. In a recent report, Shira Greenberg, Israel’s Chief Economist at the Ministry of Finance proposed an extensive regulatory framework that would bring trading platforms and cryptocurrency issuers into compliance and would increase the authority granted to its financial regulators.

Shira Greenberg stated:

The regulation processes are being formulated and determined during this period in various countries in the Western world and it is recommended that the state Israel will act in accordance with the emerging standards in the developed world.

Finance Ministry’s Recommendations

In the set of recommendations, Greenberg suggested Israel strengthen investor assurance and protection. For this, the country should implement more stringent licensing standards on trading platforms and crypto issuers, as well as by ensuring that funds generated from digital assets are maintained more securely. 

Greenberg further recommended that the Supervisor of Financial Service Providers be given significant authority to monitor licensing requirements and to build a comprehensive taxation framework for the purchase and sale of digital assets. In accordance with this, she advocated for the Israel Securities Authority to be given more power, which is necessary to determine if a digital asset is subject to Israeli securities regulations.

The recommendations also mentioned the necessity for specific stablecoin issuer license and oversight requirements, as well as the suggestion to create an inter-ministerial committee to review and manage decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), in terms of legislation.

Moreover, Greenberg continued by expressing the need for the concept of technological neutrality that regulators and policymakers should consider when developing digital asset-based rules.