Project Update: Q2 2018
We had a strong push in Q2 in an attempt to meet our overly aggressive timelines. Development has ramped up and is moving at light-speed. Regulatory and compliance build-outs remain the main source of bottlenecks. Timelines have been revised to be more conservative and pragmatic.
Overall Status
Going forward, we will be using a more formal project management framework. The assessment dimensions outlined below will allow the community to keep track of Jibrel progress on a far more granular level.
1. Legal & Compliance
Jibrel Governance & Regulatory Build-out
We currently possess the ability to compliantly roll-out our regulated offering across six jurisdictions.
That being said, to ensure full compliance, Jibrel is coordinating with relevant regulatory bodies and government agencies to ensure the roll-out fully adheres to current and planned digital asset regulation.
2. People & Capabilities
Organization, Manpower & Talent
On the organizational side, the main limitations were around front-end development. In order to reduce delays, developers were forced to work on tasks in an ad-hoc manner to achieve short-term objectives, rather than in a holistically efficient manner.
In addition, as part of the Jibrel ethos, development hires were prioritized over business hires. This led to business needs cannibalizing developer time.
To meet ever increasing manpower demands, the team has nine new hires, and we’re on the constant lookout for top performers who can add value to our team. These positions will be listed on our website in the coming weeks.
Going forward, the team will begin specializing by product. In addition, the business team will also begin to specialize by department / function.
3. Technology, Research & Development
Product Build-out & Experimentation
Jibrel develops products for consumers as well as enterprises. While the core focus of the team has been on consumer products (Jwallet, Jcash and Jnode), a lot of back-end infrastructure for our enterprise products (Jibrel Search, Clear and Core) has been set-up.
Jcash (Alpha)
Jcash architecture has been ready for some time now. The main bottlenecks experienced have been around regulation.
As part of customer on-boarding, Swiss regulation outlines a long list of regulatory / compliance criteria that must be satisfied, including a mandatory five-minute video verification of identity, with a compliance officer.
These elements have been integrated and closed User Acceptance Testing (UAT) of the on-boarding process has begun with a small (<10) group of users. User testing on actual ETH to Jcash conversion will begin once regulatory approvals are received.
Tentative Release Date: Late Q3 2018
Key Challenges: On-boarding customers efficiently and compliantly
Mitigation Strategy: Extensive UAT for on-boarding process
Jwallet (Beta)
Initially delayed due to dedicating all front-end resources on completing Jcash, the Jwallet’s development has picked up pace. With dedicated iOS and Android teams formed, we are hopeful of beginning to roll-out the web version and shortly follow-up with the iOS and Android native applications.
Tentative Release Date: Late Q4 2018 / Early Q1 2019 (mobile / native)
Key Challenges: Manpower, bandwidth limitations (front-end, iOS, Android)
Mitigation Strategy: Hired dedicated iOS, Android staff, as well as additional front-end developers to meet the growing requirements of the Jwallet Beta
Jibrel Search
Jibrel Search has also been integrated into the bulk of our solutions and has been for several months now, allowing us to iron out bugs, identify key issues and formulate solutions.
An important thing to remember with block explorers is that they are basically search engines for blockchains. Upon release, Google was one of the fastest search engines. While it may not have been directly noticeable, it makes for a more pleasant user experience and subconsciously, users appreciate and prefer it. For this reason, Jibrel Search must be the fastest ETH block explorer available.
The team have refactored a lot of the code, as well as introduced new solutions to minimize sync speeds.
In addition, the UI/UX team is now dedicating a significant amount of its time to developing the front-end interface.
Tentative Release Date: Early Q1 2019
Key Challenges: Sync speeds
Mitigation Strategy: Refactored code, introduced new sync solutions
Jnode (Alpha)
Jnode currently powers all Jibrel Applications and Solutions. That being said, the user interface is still barebones and includes a lot of manual work. Dedicated DevOps developers are working on automating the remaining elements as well as improving the dashboard / front-end experience.
Jnode is still some work away from being ready for Enterprise users to test.
Tentative Release Date: Q2 2019
Key Challenges: N/A
Mitigation Strategy: N/A
4. Marketing, PR & Community Management
Outward Facing Deliverables & Work
One of our core ethos at Jibrel is to build first and market later, as a result, our marketing efforts have left our community wanting.
Marketing & Public Relations
We have hired a dedicated PR firm, their core responsibility is to release news around product launches and key partnerships. We believe this is the responsible balance to strike in an industry where marketing initiatives heavily outweigh development priorities.
Events
While we enjoy engaging with community members, we have winded down the number of events we attend to further focus on product development and organizational build-out.
We recently attended the World Blockchain Forum in NY where our Founder and CEO, Yazan Barghuthi, discussed the view “Why all security tokens should actually be utility tokens”.
Our next event will be the International Blockchain Congress, on the 3rd - 4th of August, in Hyderabad, India.
Community Management
Similarly, with dedicated admins from the community in our social channels, our participation has heavily reduced, but while we pride ourselves in being one of the few startups that personally and periodically check-in with the community, this has been quite the time-sink for us, but we will strive to ensure the community remains well-informed, up-to-date and can contact us directly if they require direct support.
5. Safety, Security & Risk Management
Risk Identification & Mitigation Strategy Formulation
Our risk management, security and recovery capabilities were unexpectedly and unfortunately tested earlier this month.
During the Coinrail hack, 2,557,709 Jibrel Network Token belonging to Coinrail users was stolen.
Jibrel is proud that all compromised tokens were successfully recovered thanks to the quick action of our community admins, the skillful and speedy response of our dev-team, as well as the professional crises management of our operations team who streamlined the recovery process through an easy to use form and tutorial.
We’re currently waiting on Coinrail and related parties to provide certain compliance information and we will begin processing all refunds.
While some of the process could have been managed better, particularly around communication in our social media channels, this has been a learning process.
Since the hack, we’ve improved our capabilities even further by implementing notifications for suspicious transfers (e.g. Significantly large transfers from centralized exchanges to decentralized exchanges), as well as formalized the internal business protocols to deal with such unfortunate events in the future.
Conclusion
We’ve historically underestimated the timelines required to meet deadlines, primarily because we have underestimated the amount of regulatory and compliance hurdles we would need to overcome to launch our products compliantly as well as overestimated the maturity of certain infrastructure elements and 3rd party support.
We are confident that with the new team members, dedicated compliance staff and a few more late nights, we can start aggressively rolling out products and services.
We thank all Jibrelites and the wider community for their support and patience!
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 registered in Zug, Switzerland.
