The cryptocurrency ecosystem has boomed for the last couple of years. The real economy, however, has stood on the side. The volatility along with other factors, such as liquidity risks have kept institutions away from the crypto sector. The Jibrel Network’s aim is to take traditional assets and commodities and put them on the blockchain. It does this by converting currencies, stocks and various other financial instruments into ERC20 tokens.
Based out of Switzerland, the Jibrel ICO sold $30 000 000 worth of tokens in just over a month, with the crowdsale ending on the 1st of January 2018.
Jibrel lets users, brokers and investors tokenize cash and financial market instruments and set them on-chain for profit. Depositors receive Crypto Depository Recepits (CryDRs), which represent ownership of their assets within the Jibrel Platform. Decentralized organisations and funds can use the network to hedge into stable money market tokens or to store funds. The cash-backed CryDRs can be used to store send and receive money into any currency for free, and since CryDRs are regulated, all transfers go through a KYC process.
The Jibrel Network is aimed towards combatting problems and inefficiencies in the current worldwide financial system. Jibrel puts conventional currencies like the USD, the AED and the KRW on the Ethereum blockchain as the so-called jTokens. These can be bought in exchange for the JNT token. The jToken remains steady in value regardless of external market circumstances, and can be used as a payment method or converted back into fiat currency.
Jibrel’s smart regulation allows for the automatization of cash flow between sender and receiver, it verifies if the buyer is eligible to purchase the asset and if both ends of a given contract are met. For example, an IPO could theoretically convert its shares into CryDRs and go live on the Jibrel platform at a much lower cost.
The main problem with Jibrel is that it aims do disrupt the financial sector, and while it had tests with Jordan’s Central bank and Dubai’s Financial Service Authority, the whole picture is much bigger than that. The big old financial institutions that handle most of the asset trading are very cautious and pessimistic towards most innovations and are very unlikely to just hand over their control to a small platform like Jibrel. In addition, the platform is quite complicated and the ins and outs can be quite difficult to understand to a regular user.
Jibrel is definitely a unique and interesting project. It does, however, have quite the challenge ahead of it. The team seems dedicated and active on conferences and social media, but for anyone to take the project seriously, they need to get in contact with more reputable financial institutions to test their platform. Starting off small would be their best bet, as attempting to tackle the established giants or get large companies to use their software would be a waste of time at this point of development.
