Jur 2019 Outlook — A Letter from CEO Alessandro Palombo

Chris Connelly
Jur.io
Published in
4 min readFeb 1, 2019

--

Dear Jur Community,

As 2019 begins, it is time to take stock and assess our opportunities. In the next few years, we will rewrite the future of the legal sector. We have been working on some major changes to the project along with some significant new business relationships and we are closing a strategic investment and partnership with a major force in the blockchain sector. With all these developments, we have some major news about Jur that we’d like to share. But first, we’d like to articulate our broader vision.

What We Have Accomplished in 2018

Since we began accepting applications in 2018, we have built the Jur Alliance into a community of over 6,000 members in more than 20 countries to help guide the future of legal technology. We also established a Scientific Committee of top experts in legal technology and Advisory Board with blockchain experts to guide us in designing and deploying Jur.

We have created the first version of our product, described in our initial whitepaper: a totally decentralized oracle for dispute resolution. We will release it on Testnet in the near future. We have also designed several new features including legally binding arbitration and we will be announcing them soon and providing all the details in our forthcoming revised whitepaper.

We have presented our idea in blockchain events around the world. From our base in Zug, we have established compliance with Swiss law, receiving a non-action letter from FINMA, and have created eight new partnerships to offer dispute resolution to DAPPs and platforms.

The Future of the Crypto World — ICO’s and STOs

The 2018 cryptocurrency crash was a lesson for every project and every investor in the crypto sector. Giddy with bitcoin success, investors poured resources into unproven projects in very early stages of development. Many projects have failed to deliver promised products and were abandoned.

Projects that did not release true utility tokens used the initial coin offering (ICO) concept to skirt regulations on conventional business funding raising using stock offerings. Looking forward, we expect to see far less of this type of ICO. Many other projects in pre-ICO stages have made an assessment, realized their project does not use a utility token, and recognized that they should use a security token offering (STO) to fund their project rather than claim to be making an ICO.

We believe that STOs will be an important tool for fundraising in the future of finance. But decentralized systems driven by utility tokens will dominate the future of the internet. So as the decentralized economy takes shape, we expect to see many worthy projects delivering real value to users on platforms powered by tokens sold in ICOs and private presale. Jur is building a user base of experts in private presale and will proceed to ICO when we have created adequate public awareness to form a larger user community.

Building A User Community

We have re-evaluated our go-to-market plan and decided to delay the release of our first product and our ICO. We have seen a lot of initial coin offerings draw substantial investment only to collapse in value when weak-handed speculators sell off. Jur has always been committed to launching a product that offers real value for real users by bringing new more efficient methods to the legal sector. Jur represents a new generation of blockchain projects — blockchain beyond the hype.

Some blockchain projects are “on hold” — waiting until the token market recovers to launch their ICOs. Jur is moving forward, focused on strong products and a real community of users who need our tokens. Jur will wait to begin our public token sale until we have created adequate user demand, in part through strategic partnerships with platforms that already have many users.

The Next Steps

Jur 2019: The Court Layer — Legally Binding Arbitration

We have improved the Hub concept from our first whitepaper by adding new rules to create The Court Layer with legally binding arbitration. ( The original Hub concept is also maintained, but is now called “Community”).Our decentralized system will be simpler to use, faster, more affordable, and more accessible than conventional arbitration, and includes powerful anti-corruption, peer-review, and ranking features. With Jur Court Layer arbitration, anyone in the world will be able to easily obtain a legally binding judgment for a business dispute. In 2019 we’ll be developing and testing the Court Layer.

Jur will soon release:

The New White Paper with Updated Roadmap & Court Layer Explanation

Strategic Investment and Partnership News

TestNet Version of The Open Layer for Public Testing

Get Involved!

Please join us in creating the future of legal technology! Get involved here in the comments and let us know what you think. You can also Join the Jur Alliance, a network of legal tech and blockchain experts and future Jur users that helps guide the development of Jur features.

Join Jur’s official community chat on Telegram.
Visit our Website
Join the Whitelist

--

--

Chris Connelly
Jur.io

I started developing software in 1976 & helped create the first internet bank, the Etrade bank. Student of philosophy, politics, economics, math & game theory.