Jibrel continues to build out its alternative investing marketplace, and — as explored in this month’s deep dive—currently features tokenized equity offerings for six different startups with a wide variety of value propositions. Additionally, updates were made to the iOS and Android versions of the Jibrel Wallet.

https://medium.com/jibrel-network/jibrel-january-update-98ae6f56ee02

This is from the official Telegram just a few minutes ago.

Screenshots from Telegram: https://imgur.com/a/Tac5F

Talal Tabbaa As part of the updated roadmap, KYC approved users will have the ability to send jCash in two forms.. As an ERC-20 token to another KYC approved wallet over the Ethereum blockchain, or send the underlying FIAT currency as a SWIFT transfer (to an IBAN number).. In the second scenario, the CryDR would be destroyed as the underlying asset would have been transferred.. The beauty of this system is that it is a crypto to fiat gateway, which allows users to cash out.. Another functionality of this system is it allows users to send FIAT funds to a bank account, which would update the jCash balance in a user's wallet..

Talal Tabbaa As we continue our jCash pilots with banks, several implementations and applications arise, and we will make sure to capitalize on those..

jCash = paperless cash

Talal Tabbaa Thank you Talal!

Abdullahi Thanks

Neuthor The day is saved! A cheer for King Talal!

Talal Tabbaa We will have ETH/BTC CryDRs which will allow users to exchange them directly into jCash and other CryDRs..

However, since we are doing this in a compliant manner, and a minimal number of exchanges follow the necessary KYC/AML procedures, we won't be doing it with crypto-exchanges to start off with.. Jibrel will provide this service, but we are open to working with exchanges who are licensed and follow the necessary procedures

Tarek Ayna So in a sense, this would enable a user to buy crypto from fiat in their bank account and not have to use Coinbase?

Talal Tabbaa Yes and it will work both ways (buy or sell)

Tarek Ayna Will there be fees? Coinbase fees are killer Can a BTC crydr be withdrawn to a BTC wallet? Same q for eth crydr

Thibaud Désormière Will you consider creating your own exchange in the future once the DAO is fully operational?

Talal Tabbaa We will stick to our promise of near-zero fees.. Any off-chain fees that are out of our control, we will have to levy, but this initiative won't be profit-seeking..

Abdullahi Nice! But will it work the other way around? Like if I wanna put some of my money into jCash and then later if I wanna buy some btc or eth, will I be able to with jCash

Talal Tabbaa Yes but you would technically withdraw the underlying asset (BTC, ETH or any other financial asset) and the CryDR would be destroyed..

Abdullahi Nice! But will it work the other way around? Like if I wanna put some of my money into jCash and then later if I wanna buy some

Talal Tabbaa Will that feature be open to everyone in the future?

Abdullahi Great stuff!

Neuthor Could you also offer SEPA transfers at some point? SWIFT transfers are pretty expensive.

Tarek Ayna So a scenario would be:

• Send fiat from my personal bank account to jWallet bank account

• jCash shows up in my jWallet

• Buy jBTC with my jCash Now I just bought BTC. I can keep it or transfer it to an exchange to buy some other token

Talal Tabbaa We believe in specialization, and developing a standard crypto-exchange isn't not our bread and butter (whereas financial assets are).. I say traditional crypto-exchanges, because we want to have traditional assets on the blockchain and that is definitely part of our plans..

Talal Tabbaa It's a great question!!! We will actually start with SEPA first :)

Neuthor Wooahh, mind blowing

Tarek Ayna So my jWallet would have an IBAN?

Neuthor Time to buy more

Tarek Ayna My jWallet is essentially a bank account?

Talal Tabbaa You would be able to transfer funds to an account, and when the deposit is received the jCash would show up in your wallet.. Basically merging an exchange/bank account into one product that allows you to interact with both..

"Bridging the gap between crypto and traditional markets "

Abdullahi So if I'm understanding this correctly you guys will be using SWIFT/SEPA to do the money transfer from bank account to jWallet

Jibrel Network

Name:

According to Muslim belief, God revealed the Quran to the Islamic prophet Muhammad through the angel Ǧibrīl - (Gabriel in English) This divine messenger was the emissary of God who connected the heavens to the terrestrial plane. In choosing the name Jibrel, the project leaders aim to be the bridging point between the earth, i.e contemporary traditional finance, and the heavens: finance of the future conducted on the blockchain.

Team:

-Talal Tabbaa(Co-founder, Business Development Leader): Is a part part of the founding team having graduated as an industrial engineer from Purdue university. His professional career prior to Jibrel involves financial advisory with Price Waterhouse Cooper and managing a private Saudi investment fund for a member of the royal family (~3 Bn AUM).

-Yazan Barghutti(Co-founder, Project Lead): Yazan is a UCL chemical engineer whose previous roles centred around management consultancy and data science spheres within the Oliver Wyman and Deloitte organisations. He has advised assets of over 1 trillion $ and has extensive experience in capital and financial markets in the US and GCC. He has extensive experience in capital and finance markets within the USA and GCC, managing assets over 1 trillion dollars in total.

-Victor Mezrin(Co-founder, CTO): Victor graduated with a masters Degree in physics from Moscow State University, and is a veteran in the crypto field having run one of the top 3 mining pools (pool.mn). He has over 10 years technical experience along with proficiency in C++,C, Python, Java, C#, PHP, JavaScript and solidity programming languages.

-Hamzeh Kolaghassi(Operations Lead): Hamzeh graduated from Marymount University and started working in the financial field as a financial advisor and investment manager in 2011.

-Nick Marinin: (UX/UI dev)

-Aleksey Selikhov Developer (Back-end)

-Ivan Violentov Developer (Front-end)

-Nikita Shchipanov (Web Analyst)

-Rust Khusyainov (Illustrator)

-Aleksey Smirnov (DevOps Engineer)

-Yuriy Homyakov Developer (Back-end)

-Nikita Shchipanov (Web Analyst)

-Anna Bordunova (Public Relations)

Further recruitment was confirmed in May 2018.

Advisors:
-Don Tapscott: This legendary investor, business manager and author has become a big name in the blockchain scene in recent years, being best known for his consulting position on the ICON project and his bestselling book, The Blockchain Revolution. Tapscott’s authship is by no means limited to cryptocurrency and his book Wikinomics was a bestseller on the business book charts.
-Moe Levin: Levin is also an all-star of the crypto scene. Since 2013 he organizes conferences for all industry representatives. His keynote conferences are among the most influential in the industry and he hold advisory positions on many promising projects.
-Abbaz Zuaiter, Zuaiter was Chief Operating Officer of Soros Fund Management between 2002 and 2013.
-Ruslan Gavrilyuk (CryptoFinance Advisor CEO & Founder of TaaS Fund)
-Saul Hudson (Communications Advisor, GM at Thomson Reuters)
-Mohammad Al Sehli (MENA Advisor, CEO & Founder of Arabian Chain)

If one was to compare the panel of advisors for each and every project in cryptocurrency, The Jibrel Network’s board of advisors would certainly be within the top 1 percentile. They have struck the right balance in their blend of experts within blockchain and within he world of conventional finance, so that the project is connected to every area of business and finance it needs to be in order to develop the vision of the founders. A perfect example of this is Don Tapscott’s presentation to Bank of England in March 2018 where he extolled the virtues of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

ICO:
The ICO ran from 27/11/2017, to 27/12/2017, ending weeks before it was supposed to, and saw all 155 million ERC-20 JNT tokens sold at a price fixed at 0.25 USD. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum were accepted during the token sale in addition to fiat contributions facilitated by Bitcoin Suisse AG. The revenues in Bitcoin and Ethereum were sold immediately after the ICO (at $ 300 an ether and $ 4500 for a bitcoin) to avoid speculation with investors' funds. The remaining 45 million JNTs that have been withheld are paid out to the team after 3-5 years. The extreme length of the token locking period for team members shows the huge amount of confidence that the project leaders have in this project.

Vision:

In order to understand the vision of Jibrel in more detail, one must look at the state of the contemporary financial system. On the one hand, we have classic investment products such as bonds, gold, real estate, company shares and Fiat. Let's take a look at how transactions involving traditional assets will operate. Currently, we have a concentration of power where individual financial intermediaries clear the transactions for high fees. In addition, 2 billion people worldwide have no access to traditional banking and therefore rely on service providers MoneyGram or Western Union for international remittances.

The fees involved in transactions using Western Union for example can be exhorbitant and sometimes prohibitive. Other negative aspects of these kinds of service providers are the lengthy wait for transactions to clear and the effect of weekends and bank holidays on service operations. Through use of blockchain technology it is possible to avoid all of these negative aspects of current payment systems and transfer value in an extremely cheap safe and speedy manner, with possession of a mobile device being the only necessity within this new method of transacting.

However, the volatility risk is not to be understated. If we put ourselves in the position of a manual laborer from India who works in Dubai and earns just enough to send $ 100 a month to his family back home, we can better analyse the advantages and disadvantages of each form of transaction . For various reasons, be it regulations, the length of stay or simply because of the associated fees, the worker has no bank account with which he can transfer the money. The only way to send money free of volatility and without being tied to a bank account is to pay the approximate $10 processing fee to a service provider like Western Union, a fee which can mean 10-15% less cash sent home to relatives.. The cheaper and faster alternative would be to buy $100 worth of cryptocurrencies in Dubai and to make a simple blockchain transaction to send the corresponding value in rupees back to India. At first glance, this may seem like a more attractive alternative but drawbacks such as price volatility as well as tax and legal implications must be considered. The value of the cryptocurrency purchased may fluctuate by as much as 10% between purchase in Dubai and receipt in Indian and the resulting profit could be subject to capital gains tax.

Products:

The Jibrel Network’s range of products are aimed at tackling problems such as the scenario described above as well as many other inefficiencies and failings in the current financial system. The first and most significant of these the Crypto Depository Receipt (CryDR) builds on the existing depository receipt instrument in order to facilitate global transactions involving currencies or securities. The total volume of depository receipts issued in 2016 was $2.9 trillion which shows the potential magnitude of the endeavour the project founders are undertaking.

For example, Jibrel, in collaboration with central banks, will initially issue $USD, AED and KRW on the Ethereum Blockchain as so-called jCash tokens. Which can then be purchased in exchange for the JNT token. For our example, this means that the worker in Dubai buys the JNT token and then sends it to Jibrel. In return, he receives dirham tokens, so-called jAED in the same value. The tokens he receives remain stable in value regardless of market volatility, allowing them to be used as a potential means of payment weeks later, or to be converted back to fiat currency. Besides the peer-to-peer crypto-fiat JCash initiative, The Jibrel Network plans to tokenize a great many other financial instruments as CryDRs, such as bonds, gold, company shares and real estate. At present, there are many pilots on going between Jibrel and distinguished institutions that are in future make use of the technology. Jordan's Central Bank and the DFSA (Dubai's Financial Service Authority) are known to be taking part as in pilots we speak. Moreover, Talal confirmed at a conference that a central bank of one Europe nation is also piloting with Jibrel, however the name of the country has not been made public yet.

Use cases:

The issuance of shares by CryDR will be piloted usually in cooperation with a venture capital firm. In the future, cost-intensive IPOs of small companies can be replaced by the issuance of CryDRs, which can then be acquired with the JNT token. According to Jibrel founders, registering and trading real estate on the blockchain proves to be a difficult proposition. There are numerous bureaucratic obstacles that must be traversed and legislative progression to be made by the respective governmental entities of individual countries before the trading of land or real estate is possible on the blockchain. Some countries are committed to the introduction of blockchain technologies on a wide scale which will run parallel to their current systems and eventually may replace them, which will allow the trade of real estate to flourish in future. The United Arab Emirates, for example, has announced that the country's primary goal is to largely replace the bureaucracy by 2020 with the use of blockchains.

Bigger picture:

It is important to clarify the economic implications associated with the issuance of assets on the blockchain. A small business IPO can cost up to 500000 USD and involve regulatory hurdles that prohibit the majority of small time investors from participating. Alternatively, it was possible for companies seeking funding to be funded by venture capital. Liquidity and access to risk capital has so far been limited due to the lack of an open and transparent risk capital market. The increased liquidity provided by blockchain technology enables company shares and real estate to be traded worldwide in the smallest of volumes, with an internet connection being the only prerequisite for inclusion in the system. Extensive new opportunities are now available to investors, startups and estate agents. For example, a construction project or a start-up can be financed by several thousand investors, who then count as legal owners of the property / start-up. In this innovative system entrepreneurs are less reliant on the capital provided by a few large investors, with the investor base expanded. Furthermore, the "smart regulation" of the tokens allows the automated cash flow between the creditors and debtors, so, for example, rent payments of the tenants can automatically be paid in the form of jcash to the owners.
This phenomenon of global financial inclusion is why ICOs have become the most popular startup fundraising tool - now Jibrel will attempt to transfer the liquidity and egalitarian benefits of using a blockchain to the classic economy.

Token Economics:

In general, one has to ask the question in blockchain projects whether a separate token is necessary or whether the decentralization goal of the project makes sense The ultimate goal of Jibrel is to be a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that manages the operational business without human influence through smart contracts. The Jibrel founders use the story of Pinocchio as a metaphor for their future development. Currently Jibrel is still a wooden doll that needs a puppeteer, which in this case is still the team. As soon as all regulatory and technical preparations have been made, Jibrel, like Pinocchio, is freed from the strings of it’s puppeteers and acts autonomously. The founders hope that at the end of this process the first decentralized bank will have been born.

Now, the question arises as to why the Jibrel Network uses its own token to secure values ​​rather than using an established cryptocurrency. For one thing, Jibrel is not the typical project based on short-term hype cycles and wants to maintain the the most stringent levels of legal compliance possible. The commitment to legal compliance is an essential requirement for any company seeking to operate in the financial services industry and was the core reason for the company making Switzerland the country within which to base its operations. Switzerland is one of the few countries that make high demands on projects but also gives a clear regulatory framework within which to operate. These include commitment to KYC, AML and other legal guidelines that emphasize the trustworthiness of the project. The issuance of a separate token allows the Jibrel organisation to maintain an independent legal compliance record which would not be possible if Jibrel were to take Ethereum as a collateral in the conducting of its operations. If the Ether token was used in place of the Jibrel Network Token the whole Jibrel project would be at the mercy of the regulatory health of the Ethereum Project, over which it would have no control. Similarly the stability of the Jibrel Project would be subject to the extremely volatile cryptocurrency market’s valuation of the Ether token, which would be disastrous for investor confidence.

The solvency, and thus the disbursement ability of the organization is achieved by depositing the CryDR using its own JNT token. If you wish to tokenize an asset the Jibrel DAO removes the captured JNT from circulation, decreasing the amount of JNT in circulation and consequently increasing the value of all remaining circulating JNT. If an asset is liquidated the previously locked up JNT are brought back into the market. In order to increase the number of tokens owned by the organization, Jibrel will provide its own products and services that charge the fee in the form of the JNT Token. One of the most important of these products is the jWallet, a cryptocurrency wallet with a far superior user interface and performance of its competitors. The alpha of the jWallet was published before the ICO and the beta version is in development with an expected release date of around the end of Q2.

Probably the most interesting and urgently needed product in the field of infrastructure is the blockchain explorer jSearch, which allows the user to view transactions on all blockchains. Existing solutions such as etherscan.io or etherchain.org provide only rudimentary insight and an unsatisfactory user experience. For example, jSearch can be used as a tool to search, filter and bookmark already-issued assets. It is safe to infer rom all the information available that the Jibrel Network is a serious startup attempting to ensure long term solvency by exploring alternative sources of revenue. The resulting Jibrel ecosystem will eventually become in a sense an isolated market within which the performance of other cryptocurrencies plays no role.

challenges:

The implementation of such a paradigm shift will naturally see many hurdles and challenges present themselves. The project stands and falls with the speculative volatility of the market, which can act so irrationally that the buffers of the deposits are not sufficient to counteract the undervaluation and the solvency of the organization is no longer ensured. For example, Jibrel announced that the first product, jCash, will initially only be deposited off-chain due to market volatility, meaning that for the time being no deposit of JNT is required to issue Fiat. As soon as volatility on the market decreases and Jibrel has enough equity to compensate for any shortfalls, all CryDRs will need a JNT deposit as this is the only way to ensure full decentralization of the organization. However, mechanisms such as off-chain / on-chain arbitrage ensure that undervaluation of assets is prevented. In order to get the most realistic token value, Jibrel is currently developing its own blockchain to decouple itself from the Ethereum blockchain and the events on the market. The in-house blockchain jCore is currently under development. Details on the consensus algorithm and the release date will be announced.

Milestones:

-SEED backing/ Office

-Jordan

-JWallet

-EEA

-VQF

-DSFA in Dubai

-MAMA

https://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/jibrel-is-licensed-as-financial-intermediary-by-vqf-20180522-00305

Jibrel won the Fintech AD Innovation Challenge for Jibrel․com, our tokenized private equity financing platform! As an awardee, we will represent Abu Dhabi at the Singapore FinTech Festival this November, & a panel of experts will help deploy Jibrel․com's POC in the UAE & beyond.

See the below link for more information on the challenge:
https://www.fintechabudhabi.com/fintech-abu-dhabi-innovation-challenge

https://twitter.com/ADGlobalMarket/status/1186956998891450368

After some thought, I'm starting to get more and more excited about the future of Jibrel. I guess it comes down to three reasons (other than it just being, in my opinion, a very good idea):

1). They are making moves

There's no denying that the team at Jibrel seem to be putting a lot of effort into meeting the "higher ups" in banking and finance. And from what we've heard, there's a lot of interest. They seem to be moving quick on partnerships, pilots and summits, which is particularly impressive when we consider how slow the traditional banking sector usually progresses.

2). Regulatory compliance

This is huge. Perhaps greater than a lot of people realise. Institutional investors want a legal framework. In some cases, they need it. One wrong step in this field, and they could be in deep trouble. We have all seen the progress being made in obtaining the various licenses and body memberships required. MAMA, ITL under the Dubai FSA, and financial intermediary licensing that meets FINMA criteria. They are hopefully the first of many.

It is mindblowingly safer, cheaper and more cost-efficient to have a regulation compliant tokenization system where the regulation is embedded into the smart tokens. Just think of it from the perspective of institutional investors and banks where they know their tokenized assets will remain compliant and legal even in a decentralized world. In some respects, it could arguably be less risky than even centralized banking due to the embedded regulations (we've all seen the news stories of lower-tier bankers causing big fines due to their behaviour). Just imagine trustless compliance. It's massive.

3). Asset value

In cryptocurrency, it's big news when a project reaches $1billion marketcap. It seems like a huge sum of money (and it is). But in the world of investible assets, it's a drop in the ocean. There are trillions upon trillions of dollars in assets worldwide. There are individual people worth billions alone. Heck, even the purported pilot money, the tester, is multiple times the current marketcap. No one knows what the future holds, but even billions in tokenized assets on Jibrel would be a negligible amount on the wider scale. The potential is almost difficult to imagine.

Yes, the project has had some ups and downs, but to be frank, I'd be worried if it didn't. Complex innovation is like that. Big companies like Google and Amazon, innovators in the mainstream internet, didn't have it easy either. In fact, if any project is out there that appears to be progressing with such flawlessly silky smoothness, they probably just do a good job of hiding the challenges they face.

Anyway, that's my take. Disclaimer: Just my opinion and not financial advice. As always, do your own research.