COTI showcased its decentralized ticket marketplace in the Bank of Israel’s Digital Shekel CBDC Challenge, emphasizing privacy and efficiency.
By Temitope Olatunji
Edited by Julia Sakovich
Updated
3 mins read
The Digital Shekel Challenge, organized by the Bank of Israel, has concluded. This challenge aimed to explore innovative models for issuing a digital Shekel, with a focus on developing a two-tier system to enhance payment services, connect users to various services, and ensure privacy, security, and reliability.
Among the participants was COTI, a layer-2 privacy-focused blockchain. The team proposed a CBDC-powered decentralized marketplace intended to facilitate transactions involving real-world assets (RWAs). COTI demonstrated excellence as the only blockchain project to reach the final stage among a competitive field of fintech innovators, including major players like PayPal and Fireblocks.
The layer-2 blockchain solution proposed a decentralized ticket marketplace designed to bridge traditional banking with Web3, allowing people to use their local currency with the Digital Shekel as an intermediary. The submission was inspired by Icebreaker, a CBDC payment system developed by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). It was revealed:
“COTI’s submission took the form of a decentralized event ticket marketplace to bridge the gap between traditional banking systems and web3 where counterparties could transact in their local currency with the Digital Shekel serving as the mediating currency.”
COTI used a smart contract-based marketplace, which eliminates the need for a third party, mitigates the risk of fraud, and even lowers transaction fees. Although the demo developed by COTI did focus on concert tickets, the solution applies to many global markets, using CBDC to simplify asset exchanges.
COTI’s proposal emphasizes privacy, advocating for a balance between transparency and user confidentiality. The project leverages a novel implementation of garbled circuits to enable secure transactions with CBDCs while preserving user anonymity. This technology promises reduced operational costs and enhanced accessibility across devices, including mobile platforms. They stated:
“The privacy-focused blockchain developed by COTI offers advanced features to hold and securely transact with CBDCs. Its fast and lightweight privacy solution uses a novel implementation of garbled circuits, offering significantly lower running costs than other privacy technologies and can run on any device including mobile. The technology has the potential to enhance CBDCs as a secure means of payment.”
CBDC is gaining more popularity. In fact, three countries have launched one so far, 44 countries are carrying out tests on it, and another 20 are already in the active development stage. COTI’s contribution to the Bank of Israel Digital Shekel Challenge aimed to demonstrate how privacy-by-design can secure the growth of open digital marketplaces while respecting user privacy and financial freedom.
The Bank of Israel has progressed from its research on CBDC to piloting, with a greater focus on efficiency and cost reduction. However, it has yet to make a decision on issuance.
The COTI Network has earned a reputation as the fastest and most lightweight privacy layer in Web3. Using advanced garbled circuit cryptography, it provides robust data protection on the public blockchain. This innovation enables new use cases such as AI, DeFi, decentralized identification, confidential transactions, and more, helping drive the next wave of Web3 advancements.
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Temitope is a writer with more than four years of experience writing across various niches. He has a special interest in the fintech and blockchain spaces and enjoy writing articles in those areas. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in linguistics. When not writing, he trades forex and plays video games.
