- Israel’s largest bank is preparing to let customers trade bitcoin, ether and solana, with the US firm Galaxy providing the infrastructure behind it.
- The coins would be held by the bank’s chosen custodian rather than by you, and deposit protection schemes don’t cover crypto.
- Israel took in an estimated $22bn of crypto value in the year to June 2025, according to Chainalysis, so the demand is already there.
Ask a British high street bank to send money to a crypto exchange and there’s a fair chance the payment gets blocked or capped. Israel’s largest lender is heading the other way. It plans to sell bitcoin, ether and solana to its own customers, inside its own app.
Buying crypto through a bank feels like buying shares through a bank, and that’s the problem. It looks like part of your normal account, sitting on the same screen as your current account balance, but it isn’t protected like one. The bank or its custodian holds the keys, so you’re trusting an institution to keep hold of your coins in exactly the way you’d trust an exchange.
The convenience is real and worth something. The guarantee most people assume comes attached to anything with a bank’s name on it is not there.
What the deal actually is
The bank isn’t building a crypto exchange. It’s renting one.
Galaxy is a listed financial services firm that does the unglamorous back-end work for institutions getting into digital assets: executing trades, sourcing liquidity, and arranging custody. The bank supplies the customers and the app; Galaxy supplies the plumbing. That’s the same shape as most bank crypto launches worldwide, and it’s why these products tend to arrive with a short menu. Three coins here, not three hundred.
It’s also worth being clear about what a bank distribution deal is not. Nobody is putting crypto on the bank’s balance sheet on your behalf, and nobody is lending against it. This is a brokerage service with a bank’s branding on the front.
What you’d actually own
Here’s the bit the announcement won’t dwell on.
Bitcoin doesn’t sit inside an app the way pounds sit in a current account. It sits on a public ledger, and control of it comes down to a , a very long secret number that proves the coins are yours and lets you move them. Whoever holds the key controls the coins.
In a bank product, the bank or the custodian it hires holds that key. You get a balance on a screen and a claim against the institution. You cannot send the coins to someone else’s wallet unless the bank builds that feature, and if the custodian fails, you’re a creditor working out what you’re owed rather than someone who can simply move their money.
Deposit protection doesn’t help here either. Those schemes, the UK’s FSCS included, cover cash held at a bank. They don’t cover the value of an asset that’s gone down.
Israel has been here before
Israeli banks have circled this for years and the sticking point was never the technology. It was the money coming back the other way.
The practical barrier has been anti-money-laundering compliance: banks were reluctant to accept funds that had passed through crypto exchanges, because they couldn’t easily evidence where those funds originated. Customers reported being turned away when trying to deposit proceeds from perfectly legal crypto sales. An earlier push into retail crypto trading in 2022 ran into exactly that wall and never scaled.
What’s changed is supervisory rather than technical. Israel’s banking regulator has been working through how lenders should handle crypto-linked funds and what checks are enough, and a bank that runs the trading itself has a much cleaner answer to the provenance question: the money never left the building. Selling the asset yourself is one way to solve the problem of not trusting where it came from.
The demand was already there
Chainalysis put the onchain crypto value received in Israel at roughly $22bn over the twelve months to June 2025. That figure is an estimate built from activity attributed to the country, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a precise number, but the direction is not in doubt.
Which reframes the launch. This isn’t a bank creating a market. It’s a bank noticing that a market already exists outside its walls and deciding it would rather charge a spread on it than block it.
Britain is still going the other way
The contrast at home is sharp. Chase UK stopped its customers making crypto payments outright in 2023. NatWest imposed daily and monthly caps on transfers to crypto exchanges. Several other high street names restrict card payments to exchanges or block specific platforms entirely, usually citing fraud losses, which are genuine and large.
The UK’s movement has come from the regulator instead. The FCA lifted its ban on retail investors buying crypto exchange-traded notes in October 2025, which routes ordinary buyers towards a listed wrapper on an investment platform rather than a trading screen in a banking app. Two different answers to the same question about how normal people should be able to buy this stuff.
What to watch
The custody documentation, whenever it appears. Who actually holds the keys, whether the assets are segregated from the bank’s own, and what happens to customers if the custodian goes under. Those three answers matter more than the launch date.
After that, whether Israel’s other large lenders follow within a few months. One bank doing this is a commercial bet. Three doing it means the supervisor has quietly settled the question, and that’s the version that eventually gets copied elsewhere.