Jibrel: November Update
Development is moving quickly, Jwallet (Android) to be released in select geographies next week. We’ve made significant strides in business development and announced that we’re working with several top tier financial institution to build production-ready enterprise solutions. Jibrel is moving along nicely!
Overall Project Status
November was heavily focused on developing the smart contracts for an Enterprise client, Al Hilal Bank. The October update highlighted we experienced some delays across Enterprise offering build-out, this was a result of dedicating most of our efforts to the most promising project, building-out Al Hilal Bank’s Digital Sukuk Certificates.
Jibrel successfully deployed Smart Contracts relating to the settlement and secondary trading of an Islamic Bond. The product has been dubbed Smart Sukuk. Jibrel aims to build further on the success and build a platform for the intra-bank secondary trading of Islamic Bonds, as Phase II of the project.
In addition, Jcash will need to move from Alpha (Live) to Beta (Q1 2019) to allow scalability in order to on-board the strong pipeline of enterprise clients. The beta will allow institutions and individuals to become liquidity providers, incentivized by JNT fee share.
Crypto-products are moving along nicely, with the Jwallet Android ahead of schedule and will be released in Ireland and the UAE next week.
Jwallet iOS is on-track for a Q1 2019 release (January: select geographies, February: all geographies).
Jnode and Jticker are on track and should move to production just in time for additional enterprise client on-boarding.
Finally, Jibrel has begun building out a dedicated UX team to ensure B2C products are intuitive and user-friendly, particularly for Jibrel Search, which is also on-track.
While Blockchain Pilots have been slow to materialize, our recent success with Al Hilal Bank has sparked interest across numerous institutions, regulators and governments. We are hopeful that pilots will begin to close at a much faster pace going forward, driven by overall Jibrel awareness and increased regulatory clarity.
Achievements, Challenges & Limitations
That being said, we have previously struggled to scale effectively and have felt pain-points around certain operational activities such as Customer Support, Internal Reporting and Marketing / PR.
In addition, we experience significant limitations around bandwidth, and prioritization, being a small team (6 core team members) that seemingly grew overnight to 30.
Furthermore, we have struggled with turning around localization / translations and are considering building out a localization team to ensure multi-language support can be delivered quickly and efficiently.
Finally, we have historically struggled working with vendors or third-parties, given their inability to move as quickly as our internal teams. That being said, as the organization matures, we’ve been increasingly able to attract more reputable firms to support us in our drive to mainstream adoption! We expect this limitation to not hold us back going forward.
Human Resources
Jibrel added six new team members this month. Three business-side hires, as well as three development-side hires.
Moreover, Jibrel has started to ramp-up its BizDev hires, in anticipation of product launches. With core products coming online, Marketing, PR and Community Management will be a key focus area for the Jibrel team from here on out. The new hires reflect this shift in focus.
Monthly Deep-dive
Understanding DLT Securitization Implementations
Each month we select a focus area to discuss on our Monthly Town Hall. This month, we focused on DLT Powered Securitization / Debt Instrument Issuance.
Numerous crypto-startups as well as incumbent financial institutions have begun to build pilots and proof of concepts for production-ready solutions.
Jibrel recently announced that it had successfully assisted Al Hilal Bank in settling the world’s first Smart Sukuk (Islamic Bond) on Ethereum.
Several entities have developed similar solutions, including JP Morgan, The World Bank and IBM. Jibrel’s current offering focuses on Islamic Finance.
Jibrel was heavily featured in the news for this achievement, across both traditional media outlets as well as blockchain / crypto-specific news outlets.
While the transaction involved only a single purchase of ‘Jsukuk’, future iterations will enable larger sale volumes, blockchain-powered KYC/AML, as well as facilitate the organic formation of secondary markets, for low liquidity assets. In addition, the same architecture can be repurposed for the secondary trading of a wide range of financial assets and instruments.
Jibrel will leverage successful enterprise projects to increase network usage and adoption. The main limitations are still awareness and regulation. Many enterprise clients are wary of virtual currency implementations, and numerous regulators outright ban live solutions involving virtual currency.
We believe success on this front will be the main value differentiator for Jcash vs. other stable coin solutions, regulator blessings and enterprise adoption.
Delivering this level of scalability (+US$ 100 MN in value) in a decentralized system will be a challenge, but we are confident of further developing our scaling solutions and solvency mechanisms in 2019, when Jcash moves from Alpha to Beta.
Conclusion
- Crypto-product development is largely on-track
- Jwallet Android will be the first B2C product out of the gates
- We’ve successfully piloted a B2B solution with a top tier financial institution, Al Hilal Bank
- We believe the main differentiator for Jcash will be enterprise adoption
- Scaling Jcash will be a challenge, both technologically and in terms of user adoption
- We are confident our 2019 initiatives will promote Jcash adoption amongst enterprise users
- New hires, particularly on the business side will help drive Jibrel awareness and adoption
- We’re still pushing on exchange listings, although these have become much more challenging given the current market
- Jibrel is slowly but surely beginning to make major moves, we expect brand awareness to grow substantially in 2019 as more and more Jibrel enterprise projects move out of the confidentiality phase and go live
If you require additional support or have a technical question, please contact the Jibrel Support Team.
Jibrel provides traditional financial assets such as currencies, commodities, debt instruments and securities, as standard ERC-20 tokens, on the Ethereum blockchain. Jibrel AG is a public limited company domiciled in Zug, Switzerland.
