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.