Crypto City Tel Aviv

One of my favourite cities on this planet is Tel Aviv. The "Hill of Spring" (which is what Tel Aviv means in Hebrew) has all a city needs to be attractive: long beaches, plenty of good restaurants and cafés, museums and galleries and a vibrant night life. 

It also has a very active Bitcoin scene. Israeli is a start-up nation with more venture capital being invested than in most European cities, only topped by Silicon Valley itself. And of course there are many companies which are now working on cryptocurrencies and Blockchain technology.

The Bitcoin Embassy in Ahuzat Bayit Street is the heart of the Tel Aviv crypto scene. It has been founded in 2014 and every time I am in Tel Aviv I drop by to see old friends and meet new ones. 

There is a regular meetup every Sunday, but you can go there every day to change Bitcoin at an ATM and ask the friendly staff all kinds of questions.

A new place in town to buy and sell Bitcoin and to learn more about crypto is Bitcoin Change, which is located in a very prominent store on one of Tel Aviv's main shopping streets, Rehov Dizengoff. While the Embassy is a bit hidden and you have to know it, this venue can't be overlooked. 

One of the staff members told me that lots of tourists take pictures of its storefront and many media use the image of Bitcoin Change to illustrate articles about Bitcoin, even if Bitcoin Change is not even mentioned.

There are some places which accepts Bitcoin, which helped me a lot over the first week-end, when my debit card was not charged because of the long German bank waiting times. If was completely out of Euros or Shekels, but I easily survived spending Bitcoin directly at several places, among them the Israeli restaurant Shenkin 17 on Shenkin Street and the kosher pizzeria L'Olivier on Allenby Street. 

I still don't know what makes a pizza kosher (no cheese and salami at the same time?), because I had a Shakshuka there. That is a delicious combination of eggs, tomatos and spices, a typical Israeli breakfast dish.

While there are only a handfull of places that accept Bitcoin, the Tel Aviv Shekel, a local cryptocoin, is widely accepted in Tel Aviv by more than 1,500 restaurants, cafés and shops. You can buy Tel Aviv Shekels with a credit card and pay directly in a very user friendly app, which at the same time works like a map for trendy places. If you use the Tel Aviv Shekel, you can buy everything with a 10% discount, so many consumers use it and stores are willing to accept it, as it brings them new customers.

I had a very interesting talk with Mark Smargon, one of the founders of Colu, which offers the Tel Aviv Shekel, as well as similar local coins in Jaffa, Haifa, Liverpool and London. They just finished their ICO, and their plan is to use their own CLN token as a kind of reserve currency which would allow anyone to issue their own Ethererum based local currency. Mark will be a speaker at our UNCHAIN Conference, and I am looking forward to his talk a lot.

So next time you are in Tel Aviv, I recommend to download the Colu app and buy some local Shekels!