Jibrel: April Update
As global business activity came to a halt, April provided Jibrel with the opportunity to restructure and focus on its priority, Jibrel Network Token (JNT).
Becoming a leading cryptocurrency will be the absolute focus for 2020. With CoinMarketCap Rankings acting as the company’s ultimate KPI.
Overall Project Status — Focusing on JNT
In March, Jibrel announced that it would be downsizing its team to 10–15 project contributors. While absolutely necessary, abruptly going from a team of over 45 project team members across numerous locations to only 11 members, concentrated in 2 offices, was never going to be easy and has proven to be mentally and physically challenging.
That being said, while there are still outstanding items to be addressed as we further consolidate the company (contractor and vendor off-boarding, adjustment of service contracts, and other administrative work), the bulk of the product and technology related work has been completed.
In addition, we have already experienced significant uptick in productivity and output, proving the initial hypothesis that Jibrel had grown too quickly and become inefficient and needed to be restructured.
A special thank you goes to the people who facilitated this smooth transition, particularly, the support of departing project contributors (former Marketing Lead - David Doss was especially critical in ensuring a smooth transition), existing Jibrel contributors, as well as our crypto-startup partners / infrastructure providers, who have provided invaluable guidance and expertise in ensuring continuity through our restructuring.
Jibrel now has 11 FTEs as well as 2 Part-Time Employees. Jibrel’s burn rate has been reduced by over 70%, and all resources going forward will need to satisfy the core mandate of ensuring Jibrel Network Token becomes a Top-100 token on CMC by year-end (currently rank #309 at time of writing) and a Top-100 cryptocurrency by H1 2021 (rank #474 at time of writing).
We hope that these targets will be revised to be more aggressive with each passing monthly update.
Failure to deliver numbers in line with these targets will imply we will have to move onto the second most preferred option among token holders, a shift away from utility tokens and towards something more substantial.
Technical Development
- Jibrel Platform: Jibrel will be pushing the next release within the coming weeks which will allow users to complete their investments using credit cards with minimal fees. Jibrel is also exploring how the platform can provide access to additional asset classes.
- Jibrel Wallet: Following our post outlining that wallet support will be discontinued, we received overwhelming feedback to maintain support for them. The team is now focused on leveraging infrastructure players (Infura and AlchemyAPI) to reduce the overall complexity of the wallets and continue service and support for the iOS, Android and Web-apps.
- Jcash: Jibrel will be revising Jcash to be more in-line with other decentralized solutions. Jibrel intends to introduce a new mechanism of providing stable decentralized assets. This mechanism will be piloted on Jcash first and subsequently rolled out to other synthetic decentralized assets.
- Jnode: One of our biggest cost and time sinks has been maintaining Ethereum nodes. This approach is a 2017 legacy when infrastructure providers such as Infura did not provide all the capabilities required to deliver a smooth user experience. Today, numerous infrastructure players have solved these issues. We had hoped to monetize Jnode in the short term, but it is likely that post wallet rework, Jnode will be winded down entirely.
- Jsearch: Similarly, with Jsearch, we expended a tremendous amount of energy solving problems that are no longer exist. Jsearch is likely to be repackaged into an analytics solution, but is on hold for now.
- Backend: The wallet rework will require a more efficient approach to dealing with user wallets and transactions, which will occupy approximately 50% of backend resources. The remaining resources will focus on planning and designing Jibrel’s DeFi solution (to be announced).
- DevOps: The departure of 75% of Jibrel core contributors has implied a lot of clean-up work. Post-wallet related activities the DevOps team will focus on optimizing resources and further cutting costs.
Marketing & PR
While global conditions have brought most industries to a halt, the blockchain and crypto-industry seem to be thriving. With the bulk of crypto-project contributors already well adjusted to remote work and coordination, we’ve seen minimal disruption to the industry, as well as events and function organizers, which have swapped large ball-rooms for zoom conferences.
Business Development
Similar to the Marketing & PR work-stream, Business Development has largely continued uninterrupted, with significant progress made on Digital Asset solutions in MENA. That being said, unless projects have a clear path towards JNT adoption, they will need to be shifted to incorporate JNT in a meaningful way, or to deliver value to the Jibrel community.
- Digital Payments: The Pilot with the Central Bank of Jordan is proving to be successful. In addition, global events have created a new-found impetus towards financial digitization, especially in Jordan, where banking penetration is under 25% and less than 20% have access to credit lines and other financial services. We believe we are well positioned to build a production-ready digital payments solution in the Kingdom, using it to enter other markets (Jordan is also a significant remittance corridor).
- Tokenized Startup Equity: Abu Dhabi and ADGM have proven to be the ideal regulator / jurisdiction to push the envelope. Their RegLab license, while limiting in terms of volumes, is very permissive in terms of services offered. ADGM has provided very clear frameworks across offerings that make it straightforward to comply with relevant capital adequacy and AML / KYC regulations. We’re confident that Abu Dhabi can continue to provide the favorable jurisdiction for the introduction of asset classes, such as listed equities.
Human Resources
As mentioned previously, Jibrel has reduced its headcount significantly, particularly externally engaged vendors and contractors, who were unnecessarily costly.
This was especially critical at this point in time. The space has clicked back into gear, with strong growth across funds locked in DeFi, Crypto-trading volumes, wallets created and other key metrics.
Jibrel will not have better opportunities to carve out a DeFi stake in the future, the time is now. We have restructured and concentrated the team to achieve this objective.
Conclusion
Key Takeaways
- We’ve shifted our priorities to focus on JNT above all else.
- Jibrel will aim to be a Top-100 token by year-end.
- Jibrel will aim to be a Top-100 cryptocurrency by H1 2021.
- We’ve slimmed down the team to the most effective members who subscribe to the “JNT as a leading token” target and vision.
- Jibrel vendors, contractors, and contributors who were not fully committed to the vision were let go.
- Jibrel understands that it has an obligation to deliver the products conceptualized to the community who have been incredibly patient — including an adopted, fully-functional, and liquid token.
- Given regulatory restrictions, outward-facing material will be sanitized to ensure it complies with all relevant legislation and regulation, that being said, the team will be much more active across social channels (especially Telegram) to ensure the community is well-informed along the way.
- We encourage community members to message the project team on Telegram asking questions, providing your opinions, insights, and recommendations. If we are to build significant JNT adoption, it will need to be done with strong community input.
Jibrel provides tokenized financial assets such as equities, currencies, commodities and bonds, on the Ethereum blockchain.
