Bank Leumi and Galaxy Digital said Thursday they’ll bring cryptocurrency trading to Israel’s largest bank through its digital investment arm, Pepper. “Customers of Leumi and PEPPER, the bank’s mobile digital banking arm, will be able to buy, hold and sell selected digital…
sets, including Bitcoin, Ether and Solana, within the Leumi Trade capital markets application,” an official press release says. “Trading will take place in a dedicated, secured section of the app. The service is expected to become available to customers in early 2027.” It isn’t Leumi’s first swing
In March 2022, Pepper Invest said it would enable BTC and ETH trading through crypto infrastructure and tokenization company Paxos, also billing itself the first Israeli bank to do so. That service never launched, because the necessary regulatory sign-off never came. Back in 2022 there was a plan to provide similar services, but the deal stalled at the Bank of Israel.
Why the second attempt looks different Up until this summer, Israeli banks auto-delayed crypto-linked deposits and could refuse fiat from crypto sources outright, and licensed firms could only trade a short list of coins with no clear custody-capital rules. That changed in mid-2026 when the Bank of Israel removed the deposit delays and barred blanket refusals of funds from licensed providers, the Capital Market Authority set wallet-security and capital standards (2 million New Israeli Shekels for non-custody firms, 2.5 million New Israeli Shekels with custody, plus mandatory customer-asset segregation), and an August 1 circular opened trading to the top 50 coins by market cap above a $500 million threshold—which means a regulated, lower-friction on-ramp now exists for banks like Leumi to bring crypto directly to retail customers. Galaxy also holds a New York DFS BitLicense, the state’s crypto business license, and a money-transmission license from May 2026, giving Leumi a regulated counterparty.