The idea of an economic and financial system where transactions and contracts between individuals, corporates and other economic units are governed more by concerns about ethics and morality than all other concerns continues to gain traction. The recent nomination of IBF Net Group by the Algorand X Draper Blockchain Accelerator Program for building a miniature Islamic economy on its blockchain protocol is a pointer to this.
IBF Net, initially started in 1999 as an online community of students, researchers, knowledge-seekers and professionals interested in Islamic Finance, is currently being moved to the blockchain and is in the process of building platforms in line with the trichotomy of an Islamic economy into philanthropy, not-for-profit and for-profit sectors. These platforms would be using smart contracts to facilitate the entire array of Islamic financial transactions within the Network amongst its members in a multitude of roles – donors, volunteers, lenders, borrowers, guarantors, beneficiaries, buyers, sellers, investors and what-have-you in the miniature economy, which is replicable and decentralized with no institutional intermediation and that facilitates person-to-person contracting or transactions involving small groups of individual members, according to Dr. Mohammed Obaidullah, an Islamic economist and Founder of IBF Net. IBF Net Group has entities and a strong presence spread over Ireland, Malaysia and Singapore.
For this ambitious project to be launched from Ireland, IBF Net has been nominated for the Algorand-Draper Blockchain Accelerator Program offered by the Algorand Foundation, in partnership with Draper University and Borderless Capital. The program supports entrepreneurs and early stage projects looking to build applications on the Algorand blockchain. The launch of the Draper Accelerator follows the success of Algorand Foundation accelerator programs across Asia, Europe and LatAm. The program aims to empower projects to build, grow and foster innovations in the Algorand ecosystem.
“We have successfully won a coveted grant of US $35,000, which includes funding of US $20,000 from Algorand Foundation, and an initial seed investment of US $15,000 from Borderless Capital with a possibility of a further follow-on funding of up to US $500,000”, says Mohammed Alim, CEO.
The program will comprise sessions with Algorand platform experts and advisors from the Silicon Valley. For the duration of the 10-week accelerator program, IBF Net will receive end-to-end support across the spectrum of strategy formulation, go-to-market execution, and subject matter guidance across technological mentorship, token economics, marketing, and fundraising. This will further enhance the quality of the products and solutions being developed by IBF Net for the halal ecosystem.
Algorand is the next generation decentralized public blockchain network, enabling the transformative potential of blockchain technology to be used by mainstream applications securely, at global speed, and on a sustainable, carbon negative platform. Its unique combination of open-source Layer-1 capabilities – bringing together global scale, cryptographic security, low cost/instantly finalised transactions, easy to build yet powerful smart contracts, simple tokenization with a negligible energy footprint – will finally allow businesses, innovators and creators to bring the power of digital money, decentralized-open systems & censorship resistant transparency to their users and customers around the world.
