Bank Leumi Partners with Galaxy Digital to Offer Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana Trading in 2027

Bank Leumi, Israel's largest bank, announced Thursday it will offer cryptocurrency trading through a partnership with Galaxy Digital, giving retail customers direct access to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana via the bank's existing Leumi Trade investment app beginning in early 2027.

The deal marks one of the most significant crypto integrations by a traditional bank in the Middle East. Customers will be able to buy, hold, and sell all three assets without leaving Leumi's platform, a structure that mirrors similar custody-and-trading arrangements major U.S. and European banks have pursued over the past two years. Galaxy Digital, which operates institutional-grade crypto infrastructure across trading, asset management, and custody, will provide the backend for the service.

Israel is not a marginal market for this kind of product. According to Chainalysis data, the country received an estimated $22 billion in on-chain crypto value in the 12 months ending June 2025, reflecting a retail and institutional base that is already deeply engaged with digital assets. That volume gives Leumi a clear commercial rationale: crypto demand exists among its customers whether the bank facilitates it or not. Bringing trading in-house lets the bank capture fees and deepen account relationships rather than cede that activity to exchanges.

The three-asset lineup is deliberately conservative. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana cover the assets with the deepest liquidity and the most established regulatory treatment globally, reducing legal exposure for a bank operating under Israeli financial supervision. Offering a broader selection of tokens would introduce significantly more compliance complexity at launch. A narrow initial offering is consistent with how other traditional banks have entered the space, starting with BTC and ETH before expanding. The announcement did not address whether Leumi will add assets post-launch.

The early 2027 timeline carries weight as a qualifier. This is a forward commitment, not a live product. Nearly 18 months of regulatory, technical, and market variables sit between the announcement and the first customer trade. Israeli financial regulators have signaled increasing openness to crypto services within supervised institutions, but formal approval processes, custody licensing, and consumer protection requirements will all need to be satisfied before the app goes live. Any shift in the regulatory posture of the Israel Securities Authority or the Bank of Israel during that window could alter the scope or schedule.

For Galaxy Digital, the partnership extends a pattern of positioning the firm as the institutional plumbing beneath traditional finance's crypto ambitions. The company has pursued similar arrangements with banks and asset managers across North America and Europe. A deal with a systemically important bank in a high-adoption market like Israel adds a credible reference point for future business development.

Legacy banks that once treated crypto as a reputational liability are now treating it as a product category they cannot afford to ignore. Bank Leumi's move, backed by $22 billion in demonstrated on-chain activity in its home market, reflects a calculation that the regulatory risk of offering crypto has dropped below the commercial risk of not offering it.