Jibrel End of Year Update (2019)
Building and shipping the Jibrel equity platform, alongside key infrastructural components, to actualize the Jibrel White Paper
This year, we have made significant progress with the Jibrel equity tokenization platform. Business development and regulatory progress continues at a steady pace, while projects and collaborations continue with ADGM, MBRIF, CBJ, and others. Aside from focusing on the technical development of the Jibrel platform, the tech and product teams have made significant strides on generating production-ready iOS, Android, and Web versions of the Jibrel Wallet (Jwallet)—which in 2018 had been in alpha and beta stages. 2020 will be focused on:
(1) Generating a stage-by-stage buildout of the Jibrel equity platform
(2) Finding value-driving & regulation-compliant JNT use-case solutions
(3) Developing additional user-facing purposes for Jibrel’s infrastructural building blocks such as Jsearch, Jticker, and the Jibrel Wallet
In This Update:
1. Organization Buildout:
(A) Vision & Goals
(B) People & Capabilities
(C) Marketing
2. Asset Tokenization
(A) The Jibrel Equity Platform
(B) Other Assets & Overall Ecosystem Development
3. Technical Development
1. Organizational Build-Out
Actualizing the White Paper While Pursuing Long-Term Efficiency
A. Vision & Goals
Our overall goal is to generate long-term value — both inside and outside of the blockchain community — by bridging the worlds of traditional and digital assets. In order to fulfill this goal in 2019, we pursed many different technical, product, and business development avenues.
The team has been steadfastly pursuing the regulatory, business, technical, and other components of the Jibrel equity tokenization platform. We hope that, despite periods of uncertainty, the current vision of Jibrel remains clear: our #1 priority is the development of the Jibrel equity tokenization platform, as a steady step towards fulfilling the vision outlined in the Jibrel Whitepaper.
In 2019, aside from the tokenization platform, Jibrel has focused on a number of other technical, product and business development priorities. As far as tech and product go, various projects such as Jticker, Jsearch, and the Jibrel Wallet have had less than ideal upside as standalone products, due to rapidly shifting market conditions. At the same time, we have made significant progress in 2019 on all of these, and they will continue to grow in value as key infrastructural components in larger-scale products such as the Jibrel equity tokenization platform.
As far as business development goes, we have been pursuing partnerships in the tokenization of all asset classes, including debt, equity, commodities, and real estate. That said, value-driving use cases for tokenization have varying degrees of real-world value, and in 2019 we have chosen to prioritize equity tokenization for the time being. Ultimately, as previously mentioned, the strides we are making with the Jibrel platform will drive progress not only for equity tokenization, but also for tokenization of other assets such as debt, commodities, and real estate. The legal, technical, and business development progress and learnings gained from building out Jibrel.com will serve us well in the future. As a reminder, the long-term vision for Jibrel.com is the development of a full-spectrum platform for the tokenization not just of equity, but of various kinds of securities.
In our quest to fulfill the Jibrel Whitepaper’s vision, building out additional use cases for JNT continues to be a major pain point for all stakeholders. JNT needs more and better use cases. In order to generate additional long-term use cases for JNT, we will need to increase the product-level value mentioned above — and will need to do so in a way that is fully compliant, leveraging business and operational efficiencies. While we are fully aware of the community’s understandable desire to have a a higher quality and quantity of JNT use cases, there have been no apparent options for generating additional JNT use cases that have the potential for not only long term demand, but also immediate regulatory approval and technical feasibility. As with the product and business development projects mentioned above, we need to focus on solutions that enhance long-term business and operational efficiencies.
Founders Yazan, Victor, and Talal take the JNT issue very seriously. All are in agreement that the situation with JNT needs to change. The current state of JNT does not sufficiently benefit ICO participants, the Jibrel founders, or the future of Jibrel’s products. Thus, the founders and team are working hard to find a solution that benefits the greatest number of people while minimizing legal, regulatory, and other risks. With that in mind, we ask for your cooperation. Later in January, we will be sending out an informational survey about JNT. The goal of this survey will be for us to systematically incorporate community feedback into the JNT solutioning that the founders are prioritizing for 2020.
B. People & Capabilities
Optimizing Budget and Existing Capabilities
From 2018 through the first half of 2019, the Jibrel team saw a significant growth in core contributors — growing from 9 to 31 project members in 2018, and and peaking at 46 in H1 2019. However, in H2 2019, the Jibrel project team size has leveled off around 43 contributors.
Overall for 2019, the focus has been on optimizing costs, strengthening marketing, and building out the Jibrel Platform. Core team retention rate remains above industry averages, keeping our direct costs—such as sourcing and onboarding—to a minimum, while also avoiding indirect costs such as decreased productivity and increased knowledge loss.
C. Marketing, PR & Community Management
Digital acquisition for Jwallet, & driving leads for the equity platform
Jwallet: Jwallet total installs have increased 30% from last quarter, having just recently surpassed 100K total downloads since the wallet’s inception in Q1 2019. The Android and iOS wallets together account for a total of around 135 top-5 keyword search results across various app stores in various languages.
Blog: In 2019, we have published 25 blog articles in English on the on-site Jibrel blog, oriented towards SEO, to drive organic traffic in a compounded manner over the long term. We plan to continue this approach with keywords targeted for relevance and volume—and to expand to additional languages other than English.
Events: In 2019, Jibrel team members attended over 35 events, in a wide variety of countries, including the United States, Russia, Spain, London, United Arab Emirates, Belarus, and more. On top of establishing Jibrel as a thought leader in the blockchain and fintech spaces, these events have been instrumental in developing relationships with startups, investors, regulators, and other key players around the world—all of which will be valuable in developing the core constituents of the Jibrel equity platform. While many other events have been listed in previous monthly and quarterly updates, here are the events Jibrel has most recently attended:
Past events:
- November 20: StartupBoost Global Demo Day, New York City. Startup Boost is a global pre-accelerator program with a mission to lead pre-seed stage startups towards Accelerators, Investment, and/or Revenue (AIR).
- November 27: DIFC FinTech Hive Investor Day, Dubai. DIFC FinTech Hive Investor Day is an event for startup pitches and offers one-on-one demos and networking with the fintech community.
- December 10: SALT, Abu Dhabi. SALT is a global thought leadership forum and capital introduction platform encompassing finance, technology and geopolitics.
- December 11: Startupbootcamp FinTech Selection Day, Dubai. A FinTech Accelerator program in Dubai to support the city in its bid to become a world leader in financial services innovation and technology. Jibrel’s COO, Talal Tabbaa, was a judge on the selection panel.
Upcoming events: 2020 events will be posted soon.
Jibrel in the Media: This year, team members made a wide variety of media appearances, and Jibrel was mentioned in over 65 articles, videos, and other third-party media. To check out a few of the highlights, please visit Jibrel in the News (YouTube), the News Page (Jibrel Network website), and Jibrel’s main YouTube channel.
Jibrel Equity Platform: The marketing team has been laying out plans for marketing the equity tokenization platform, which has received over 2,500 signups to date. As more news and functionalities arise for the platform, marketing will continue to become progressively more involved in user acquisition and overall demand generation.
2. Asset Tokenization
Equity platform operations & bizdev; CBJ pilot & other partnerships
As with other teams, the main focus of the business development team in 2020 has been Jibrel’s equity tokenization platform. In the past few months, they have been preparing for the launch of the platform’s MVP. This has included formulating internal processes, and setting up internal control systems. Additionally, they have been building a startup and investor pipeline in preparation for the MVP launch in Q1 2020. At this time, a number of startups will be tokenized and offered to VCs and other qualified investors on the Jibrel equity platform. As 2020 year progresses, the business development team will also be leading efforts to adopt the proper regulations to expand the Jibrel platform to a wider investor base. See Section A for a deeper dive into the Jibrel equity tokenization platform, and Section B for a look at Jibrel’s Central Bank of Jordan pilot and other partnerships.
A. The Jibrel Equity Tokenization Platform
Why equity? This past year, over $250 billion dollars was invested into startups around the world. The tremendous year-over-year growth of venture capital backed startups has produced multiple billion-dollar unicorn exits. However, access to capital still remains a problem for fast-growing startups, as investor participation has been limited to a select few institutional investors.
Jibrel’s focus: Jibrel stimulates global capital formation and reduces market frictions by deploying best-in-class financial and legal technology. We implement strict investor protection procedures, through legally enforceable digital securities, while simultaneously simplifying governance and oversight for startups, by leveraging an easy-to-use fundraising and investor management platform.
Benefits for Investors — Digital Securities: Digital securities enable seamless investability and transferability. By retaining direct control of their assets, investors can be their own equity custodians and enjoy a wide range of benefits, including ease of ownership transfer, access to secondary trading opportunities, as well as instant digital exit facilities, ensuring platform investments remain highly liquid at all times. Shareholder rights are protected and ensured through automated enforcement. Using Jibrel, investors can exercise their equity rights through a simple interface.
Benefits for Startups: The platform empowers startups with the ability to raise capital globally at a fraction of the cost and time, by attracting, onboarding and managing a much larger and a more diversified pool of investors. Moreover, ventures who implement Jibrel’s digital equity solution benefit from seamless issuance and lifecycle management of digital securities, simplified capitalization table management, automated governance and compliance, and streamlined investor management.
If you haven’t already, be sure to preregister today as an investor or as a startup/founder!
B. Other Assets & Overall Ecosystem Development
CBJ Pilot: Participants of Jibrel’s CBJ (Cental Bank of Jordan) pilot can send and receive Jibrel Jordanian Dinar cross-border, compliantly. Digital remittances became more accessible in recent years due to the widespread use of the internet and smartphones, and are now even more attainable with advancements in blockchain technology. To demonstrate the efficiency, transparency, security, and speed of these technologies combined, Jibrel is currently testing an efficient money transfer and auditing system that is regulated and overseen by the CBJ, to create a bridge between Jordanians abroad and at home to transfer money instantly with near-zero fees, across borders. This pilot with the CBJ aims to demonstrate how technologies, like blockchain, can be useful in transforming the way we communicate and transfer value across borders. Jibrel has developed infrastructure tools that utilize blockchains in regulated and compliant environments, such as the one we are currently operating in. Jibrel utilizes the public Ethereum blockchain to create programmable ERC-20 (namely ERC-20) that embed real-world rules. Jibrel is leveraging the Jibrel Wallet (Jwallet) to allow consumers to interact with the blockchain and manage their assets. Additionally, the test employs Jcash. As an ERC-20 token that has governmental compliance built into it, Jcash allows only addresses that are recognized by the regulator to send and receive this token. For the CBJ test, we have created Jibrel Jordanian Dinar (JJOD), which is a token that is backed by equal reserves in a bank account
FinTech AD and Singapore FinTech Festival: Jibrel won the Innovation Challenge at FinTech Abu Dhabi, and was a finalist for the Global FinTech Hackcelerator at the Singapore FinTech Festival for its development of the Jibrel equity tokenization platform.
MBRIF: Along with 9 other businesses, Jibrel was selected by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Innovation Fund (MBRIF) for its Summer Cohort MBRIF Accelerator program. The 10 businesses were chosen from a total of 159 applications coming from 38 countries. Applications included companies tackling some of the world’s biggest challenges in seven priority sectors of technology, health, space, water, clean energy, transport, and education. The MBRIF Accelerator program was launched in 2018 to enhance the growth potential of innovative start-ups and small and medium enterprises impacting the future of the UAE economy. It offers members access to various services and coaching from global experts in order to accelerate their innovations and elevate their capabilities.
ADGM RegLab: As of October 2019, Jibrel is now regulated by the Abu Dhabi Global Market Financial Services Regulatory Authority (‘FSRA’) for the purpose of developing and testing innovative financial technology services within the Regulatory Laboratory (‘RegLab’). For more details, see ADGM’s Financial Services and Markets Regulations 2015 document. This regulation means that Jibrel will be legally able to conduct a test where we will tokenize the equity of MENA startups and SMEs, and will offer this equity to institutional and accredited investors. Jibrel plans to continue to obtain additional licensing from the same regulator, which will enable a successively wider variety of functionalities for the Jibrel equity platform.
Other Collaborators: in 2019, Jibrel has developed and maintained ties to a number of organizations around the world, including the below.
3. Technical Development
Jibrel Platform
As their top priority, the Jibrel tech team has been building out the MVP of the Jibrel equity tokenization platform. Components include startup onboarding, investor onboarding and KYC components, tokenization infrastructure and user interface. We look forward to showing you the MVP in Q1 of 2020.
Jibrel Wallet (Jwallet)
Over the course of 2019, the iOS and Web versions have been gradually brought much closer to parity with the flagship Android version in terms of features and reliability, with all versions benefiting from an overhauled user experience and multilingual localization. Our Android version of the Jibrel Wallet is the furthest ahead in development of the three, having recently integrated Jticker price feed functionality (see below for more info on Jticker). The iOS and Web versions will follow suit in 2020. Other plans for the Jibrel Wallet in 2020 include localization for additional languages. Stay tuned for more information.
Jticker
The recent release update of Jibrel Wallet for Android is part of a bigger picture. The main feature of that release is an integration with Jticker — our engine for fetching price data caches from various crypto exchanges.The Jticker price feed will be used in several Jibrel products, with Jibrel Wallet for Android being the pioneer.
For the Jibrel Wallet, Jticker allows users to see how the price of their crypto portfolio has been changing over time, and to monitor real time price graphs for each ERC-20 token they have in their wallets. Now that we have started with the Android version of Jibrel Wallet, we plan to be integrating Jticker with the iOS and Web versions of Jibrel Wallet in 2020.
Additionally, we plan for Jticker to have various other uses, including in the upcoming Jibrel platform. We expect to build out an in-house price engine such as Jticker to offer several advantages for Jibrel in the future. As a parallel example from the past, consider Jcash, where building an in-house solution has yielded several bigger-picture advantages (such as passing regulatory requirements, and developing a pilot program with the Central Bank of Jordan). For more information on Jibrel’s product strategy, check out the Q3 Founder Q&A Video.
Ultimately, beyond its use in the latest Android update of Jibrel Wallet, Jticker will take on a life of its own. Although Jticker is a backend app (and thus can’t be used without integration with a user-facing service such as the Android Jibrel Wallet), it’s nonetheless a backend app that can be integrated with a number of different user-facing services. We look forward to sharing further information regarding Jticker’s integration with Jibrel products and services. Meanwhile, be sure to check it out in our latest update to Jibrel Wallet for Android!
Jsearch
The backend components of Jibrel’s next-generation Ethereum block explorer are largely completed. We look forward to sharing updates soon on how we will be integrating this into user-facing products and solutions.
Conclusion
Key Takeaways for 2019
- The company is focusing on the Jibrel equity tokenization platform as a top priority. Functionalities will gradually expand. This project aims to pave the way for the tokenization and trading of the other asset classes.
- Jibrel’s founders continue to search for additional JNT use casing solutions that provide the greatest benefit to all stakeholders while minimizing legal, financial, and other risks. Later in January, will be be sending out a survey about JNT as part of our planning for 2020.
- Additional highlights from business development include collaboration with the Central Bank of Jordan, Mohammed Bin Rashid Innovation Fund, and Abu Dhabi Global Market’s RegLab–as well as winning the FinTech Abu Dhabi Innovation Challenge and placing as a finalist in Singapore FinTech Festival’s Global FinTech Hackcelerator competition.
- Significant upgrades were made to the Android, iOS, and Web versions of the Jibrel Wallet, which reached over 100,000 total installs in 2019. Upgrades include multilingual functionality and an overhauled user experience. Jticker functionality (now live on Android) is slated for 2020 for iOS and Web, with other functionalities such as Jsearch planned for 2020 as well.
Jibrel provides traditional financial assets such as currencies, commodities, and equities, as standard ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.
