A Crazy Startup Story of Jibrel Network and Decentralized Finance, Chat With Talal Tabbaa

Yasi: Talal Tabbaa is the co-founder and COO of Jibrel Network, an open-source web3 development company based in Zug, Switzerland. He’s also the co-founder of CoinMena, a regulated cryptocurrency exchange under the Central bank of Bahrain, and serves on the board of Middle East payment services MEPS in Jordan. So, prior to moving into crypto full-time, Talal worked at PWC, helped manage private investment funds in Saudi Arabia. Today, I will ask him how he changed from working at PWC to start the Jibrel network and his view on the future development of cryptocurrencies. So, welcome to Fast Track Podcast, Talal.

Talal: Pleasure’s all mine. Thank you so much for having me.

Yasi: And I remember, when we met a few years ago in Zug, you told me the story about how you and your co-founders started Jibrel Network and how you and your co-founders found the other co-founders.

The story was very interesting. So, would you like to share with the audience the origin of the Jibrel Network?

Talal: Sure. It is crazy, or I thought our story was crazy up until I saw other companies and how they are formed today, but yeah. First, let me give you how we started Jibrel and actually how Yazan, my co-founder started Jibrel and how Victor and I joined.

So, I was living in Saudi Arabia at the time, I was helping manage an investment fund, that I got this fund into crypto. So, he was a member of the Saudi Royal family, and it was a fund worth billions of dollars. And I convinced them to put a small for them, a small amount of money into crypto.

I did that through a Swiss financial intermediary. So, I was probably in early 2017 spending almost all of my time on crypto, even though I was helping manage the Saudi family office fund. And basically, I saw on LinkedIn that someone called Yazan quit his job and was independently researching crypto.

So, Yazan is a Jordanian-American chemical engineer. We went to the same high school. He’s four years older than I am, and I don’t know him very well, or now I know him very well, but, four years ago, I didn’t know him very well. He was a friend of my cousins — same high school. And I knew that he was very smart and very eccentric, so I messaged them on LinkedIn saying, Hey, like, what are you researching in blockchain?

And 2016, 17, not a lot of people, at least in the Middle East, were researching crypto. And if they were doing it, they were doing it part-time. No one had quit their jobs just to do that. So, I’m like, okay, this sounds interesting. I messaged him. He’s like, yeah. I’m thinking of doing a company called Hawala. Hawala means a transfer, money transfer in Arabic or in the Middle East slang.

And I told them, so how big is your team? He’s like, yeah, there is no team, I’m starting to come up with it. And he had met a very smart physics professional, he is an engineer, but he has studied physics. His name is Victor, he’s from St. Petersburg, Russia. And he and Victor met online, which meant that up until the time I spoke to Yazan, Victor and Yazan had only chatted. They had never seen each other, they had never spoken on video. Anyway, Yazan ended up connecting all of us, and at the time, crypto was starting to pick up, you know, in early 2017, there was excitement around crypto. So, we all agreed that we would quit whatever we were doing.

I left Saudi Arabia, my job in Saudi Arabia, Victor left what he was doing. Yazan was already out of his previous job. And we started working on an idea to basically move financial assets from the real world onto Ethereum. And the thought process was crypto is a very good way to send value. You know, it’s…

You can program logic into crypto. I still recall the pitch from 2017, basically, cryptocurrencies are basically a very good way to move value, but they are not stable, regulated, or insured. You know, if you look at real estate, if you look at stocks, they are stable or somewhat stable, regulated, insured, and people understand how to value them.

So, we thought, you know what, why don’t we bring assets from the real world and represent them in the form of a token? Which now is something that became, I guess, quite popular, which is the tokenization of financial assets. We created the prototype. The prototype was to create a US treasury bill, which is the most popular security in the world and represented in an Ethereum smart contract.

So, we did that as our MVP, obviously doing it remotely, we had never met. And then we came up with, uh, or Victor and Yazan actually came up with an idea and wrote a white paper about it, where we would basically use the token to power all of these tokenized assets. So, we did, what’s known as an ICO — initial coin offering, and to do that, we had, we wanted to make the initial coin offering in a regulated way, in a proper way, because in the crypto world, there’s… It attracts the best and the worst of people, it attracts very smart, ambitious people, but it also attracts criminals.

Yasi: That’s so true. Yeah.

Talal: Like in any new industry, you know, so it’s the same with the internet when it first came out.

Anyway, the first time I met Victor was at a lawyer’s office in Zug to register the company. So, that was the first time we actually met face to face. We registered the company and got our financial license. I went back to Saudi, he went back to Switzerland. He went back to Russia, sorry. And then, at the end of 2017, we conducted an initial coin offering.

The initial coin offering was successful. We raised over $30 million, yeah, in around one month. And then the first time we actually meet in person was when we did an event in Korea in January 2018. So, we’ve been working together for almost a year. We spoke almost every hour, but we had never all been in the same room.

The first time we were in the same room was when we did something called the Jibrel blockchain event in Korea. It was a pretty big event, with over a thousand people. We had like top-class speakers, we had CZ (Changpeng Zhao), the founder of Binance, he was one of the speakers, which is crazy because at the beginning of the presentation, he comes and says, this is the first time I fly out for a crypto conference.

Which now obviously he does on a very frequent basis. That was actually the first time all three of us were in the same room, and since then, we’ve been working on various Ethereum products. In the crypto industry, a lot of it is, there are parts of crypto that have proven product-market fit, and then there are others that are more experimental. So, in our case, on the Jibrel side, similar to too many companies that are doing financial products is more on the R and D side. But that’s like the quick, I guess, intro to how we started Jibrel.

Yasi: It’s very exciting now for the audience, but one part maybe you didn’t mention is how you initially also get funding from investors to work on your own project, then you return the fund to investors. That was funny.

Talal: Yeah, that was…

So, I used to live in Saudi Arabia, and I’m a very talkative person. It depends on what time of the day it is, in the morning, usually I’m slow, but in general, I’m quite a talkative person. So, in Saudi, I convinced a lot of people to invest in Bitcoin.

Whenever I would meet someone, I was crazy about it. Probably still am a little bit crazy about it. So, I got lots of people to invest in Bitcoin throughout 2015 and 16 and 17. And obviously, these are, these became very happy investors. Actually, before reaching out to Yazan on LinkedIn, I was working on an idea of mine that has to do with supply chain and aviation because I studied industrial engineering.

So, I wanted to use blockchain and some elements of crypto to improve processes in supply chains. So I had raised about a million dollars from investors in Saudi, and basically, after I spoke to Yazan, I’m like, okay, shit, his idea is way better than mine. So, I went back to the investors, told them, listen, I’m no longer doing this. I had paid maybe $40,000 to create a prototype. I paid that myself, and I gave back the investors the money. They told me, okay, so what are you going to do? I told them, I’m doing this other thing, and they said, okay, just move the money to this other company, which kind of showed me in the first hand that investors usually bet on people and don’t bet on products or ideas because ideas or products, especially at a very early stage, can change very rapidly.

Yasi: Yeah, that’s true. Are they very happy now since they moved their investment to another project?

Talal: I mean, yeah, the Jibrel Network token was in the ICO at about 25 cents.

It reached almost a dollar, so people who were able to sell obviously were happy. But again, crypto is like, if you think of risk, level of risk, you know, the holding cash is considered low risk, I personally don’t see it as low risk, but we can get into this discussion later on. And then you have bonds, you have equities, venture capital, which is investing obviously in startups and stuff. And then you have crypto, which is perceived to have very high risk. So, investors coming into this industry kind of know that you shouldn’t put all of your life savings, you should be cautious and understand that you could lose your money.

But again, it depends on your risk profile, right?

At the time, I was a single 26-year-old engineer living in Saudi, I didn’t give a shit if I lost my money, you know. I was going to be able to find another job. I didn’t have responsibilities. Maybe now I would think of it differently, I’m married, I’m a bit older, but yeah, I mean, each person or each company can decide how their risk profile looks like.

Yasi: Yeah, absolutely correct. And still not…

Talal: But to answer your question, those investors are very happy investors.

Yasi: And now like, where is Jibrel Network? You recently launched trench finance and then a few other projects, like give us an update.

Talal: Yeah. So, uh, I mentioned when we did the ICO in 2017. When we did the ICO in 2017, there weren’t a lot of infrastructure products, meaning to use any type of tokenized assets, which was what we were creating, you needed to have a wallet, you needed to have a block Explorer. You needed to have APIs to connect to Ethereum, which meant that there were a lot of infrastructure pieces that were not ready.

So, we decided to build them ourselves. At the time, it sounded like a brilliant idea. Now with the benefit of hindsight, clearly it wasn’t the best idea because the wallets, the block explorers, everything’s available open-source and better than what we had. Anyway, we spent the past three, four years building products that allow institutions to tokenize their assets.

I think the coolest project that we did was with the Central bank of Jordan, for central bank digital currency, you know, to put the national currency on the blockchain, on the Ethereum public blockchain. It was done in a test format, so it wasn’t a full commercial scale. And it showed us that the banks, the central banks are still very far behind, or at least in 2018. they were.

So, for three years, we tried to solve a problem that wasn’t really there. You know, like I’ll give you an example. We did a Sukuk. Sukuk is the Islamic version of a bond, you know, just think of it as a bond. We did the project with a government-owned bank here in Abu Dhabi, and the bank said amazing, it saves 95% of our costs.

But the risk department said, okay, it solves 95% of the cost, but how many banks have done this before? What if the whole bond disappears? Or what if Ethereum turns off? I’m like, Ethereum can’t turn off. They said like, okay, what if it turns off, who does our legal department go to? Which kind of showed us that even if the blockchain is or crypto is a lot more efficient, the perceived technology risk doesn’t outweigh the benefits.

About six months ago, we decided to pivot, we rebranded and launched a product called tranche.finance. So, tranche.finance is basically, I don’t know if you’ve heard of decentralized finance, it’s a new subsect within crypto that allows you to borrow, lend, basically do all sorts of financial transactions.

The first version of crypto — Bitcoin allowed me to send you money without an intermediary, right? I can send you a Bitcoin from my wallet to your wallet. In decentralized finance, we can do all sorts of financial transactions, not only payments; you can borrow, you can lend, you can ensure, you can trade without an intermediary.

So that’s what we’re building with tranche. We’re actually building risk management tools for the decentralized finance space. I can go into more detail, but I don’t know if all the audience would be interested in that, but if they are, they can go to tranche.finance and reach out to me as well.

Yasi: And is it more for institutions or for companies, or it’s for individuals?

Talal: I’ll be very honest, having tried to build four institutions the past three, four years, screw the institutions for now. We built it for anyone that wants to use it, and eventually, the institutions will come. In crypto, there’s a very fine line between individual and institution.

You know, there are individuals that have money as much money as institutions, and you have institutions that barely have any money, so the lines have been blurred. The reality is on tranche.finance, we don’t know who the users are, and we don’t care, you know. And if you go to something like compound.finance, which is one of the best examples of decentralized finance, you can lend your money and make interest, or you can borrow money and obviously pay interest on that.

But the borrower doesn’t know who the lender is, the lender doesn’t know who the borrower is because it’s a trustless system. So, to answer your question, at the moment, we are building for the crypto economy, whether funds, whether individuals, companies, it doesn’t matter. And eventually, I believe that banks will have no option but to start using these networks because they are a hundred times more efficient, if not more.

Yasi: Right. And also, you start its CoinMena besides Jibrel Network and all this project you are doing with Jibrel Network. Why did you start CoinMena?

Talal: The question that I get asked the most, as someone that lives in the Middle East is Talal, I want to buy a Bitcoin, I want to sell Bitcoin, I want to buy Ethereum, I want to sell Ethereum, and the requests are many and of big value, you know, and I used to send them, or you tell them, okay, just go to this website and buy.

And then my partner and I were thinking, okay, if all of these people are asking, why don’t we create an exchange? So, we looked at the different regulatory atmospheres in the Middle East and decided that Bahrain is the best one because it’s licensed by the Central bank. So, yeah, we registered the CoinMena in Bahrain and got licensed in December, and we launched a couple of weeks ago.

So, yeah, it’s a very simple offering, allowing people to go from Fiat currency to crypto and from crypto to Fiat currency, at least for now.

Yasi: I see that your style is always launched something really fast, very efficient. Is there any experience you can share with the others? Like what did you do? You work 100 hours per week or what?

Talal: Okay. So, if you think it’s fast and efficient, I can assure you, it’s not, but, yeah, I mean, persistence is, I think, one of the most underrated and important feeds that you keep. You keep going at it until it works. And then having a division of responsibilities within the team, you need to trust the people that you work with.

I trust that if CoinMena’s managing director Dina is she’s working on something, she’s going to do it, you know, I don’t interfere with her work, she doesn’t interfere with my work. The team needs to trust one another. So, the most important thing, I believe, in startups is that you don’t have to do what you are assigned. You need to understand what needs to be done, plan it and execute. You know, it’s not like I used to work for PWC before, and in PWC, you would get the task, you’d complete the task, and that’s it. At a startup, you need to find out what the startup needs, see who needs to be working on this, and get it done.

So, like persistence and

Yasi: Take initiative, be proactive?

Talal: Yeah, being very proactive, I agree. Being proactive is probably one of the most important things, but also not giving up, like we got licensed last year in December, we applied to the Central bank of Bahrain in the middle of 2019.

For 16 months, we were just in the licensing process. But that basically is because a federal license or a central bank license usually takes time, so you need to, yeah, I guess being persistent is one of the most important things, in my opinion.

Yasi: Actually, recently I read this book, A Billion-Dollar App, and one of the key traits of all the companies that they’ve become like a billion-dollar company like app companies is the co-founders, they have this persistency. No matter what happens, they push it through. And then those companies now become, I don’t know, some of them, they mentioned like a Halo or Uber and all these big ones. And then talking about hiring teams, you see, it’s very easy for co-founders to take the initiative, to be proactive, you know, to see what needs to be done.

But for employees, it’s somehow a different mindset because it’s a job, right? So how do you find the best employees or talents to form a team?

Talal: Okay. So, this might sound weird, but basically, you cannot have employees. If you have employees, you will not succeed. You can succeed if you have like, I don’t know, a shawarma shop or something that doesn’t require people to be very innovative and pushing and… you know, if you want to do a tech business, the incentives have to be aligned.

So, you need to give employees share options. You need to give tokens if that’s what you’re doing. I used to be an employee before and like what you’re going to give me, like my boss, which at PWC, which I used to fight with quite a lot, is like, yeah, I don’t know, no. If I would fight with him, he’s like, yeah, this is going to affect your bonus. And in my mind, I’m like, fuck your bonus, you know, it’s what you’re going to give me, what, two, three, four months? I know how much money you’re making, you know, it’s as a team. If the company makes so much money, like, what am I going to get a couple of months extra bonus.

It’s capped, you know, it’s capped. And if you cap people’s upside, you cap their amount of effort they’re willing to put. But if you keep the upside uncapped, meaning if you give them options, if you give them tokens, the upside is uncapped, which means their efforts and input and contribution can also be uncapped.

That’s something that we haven’t figured out completely, obviously, because we’re still, definitely an early-stage company, but I think it’s one of the most important things: to align the financial incentives between the team and the company. So, I don’t see anyone as an employee, we see everyone as colleagues.

Yasi: Oh, that’s really nice to hear. I also like this concept. I find it so difficult to say, Oh my boss, I feel everybody’s like employees, we worked together, and that’s one of the things I really like working in the startup space. Uh, you work together.

And you’ll have a team globally, I assume, like people located in different countries?

Talal: Yeah. I mean, we used to have a proper office in Dubai, and then our lease expired in March, which was like primetime COVID, we didn’t renew, and now we just rented this office again. So, we have like six people in Dubai, my partner Yazan and CEO is in New York, we have someone in Italy, we have someone in Egypt, someone in India, people in Jordan, Bahrain. I’d say the main base in Dubai, but we hire based on skill and motivation, not on location.

Yasi: How do you coordinate with the team? How they work together with time differences, different locations?

Talal: Yeah, it’s not easy, but we have daily stand-up every day, everyone has to attend. If you can’t attend a stand-up, then you’re not part of the team, basically. Everyone has to say what they did yesterday and what they’re going to do today, without too much discussion, it’s a short call. And then we use there are many software tools that help you track.

So, on the development side, we use JIRA; for communication, internal communication, we use Slack, but it’s not easy. I would be lying to you if I told you we are operating at an efficient level, we continue to try and improve, but it’s obviously a challenge.

Yasi: But why do you choose daily stand-up instead of weekly?

Talal: Yeah, if everyone in a team is going to say what they did on a weekly basis, it becomes like very high level, you know, they don’t go into details. Whereas if it’s daily, yeah, I think we prefer daily. We have cross-team calls that are weekly, that are bi-monthly, but the stand-up is daily, and I think that has worked for us so far.

There is no secret sauce, by the way, whatever works for you, you continue. Like it’s not one size fits all for everyone.

Yasi: And also, I see that you’re also on the board of like a Middle East payment services, so, MEPS in Jordan, right? What did you do there, like, what is involved, what’s the development with the MEPS right now?

Talal: So, MEPS is like a card company. Not a card company, but they are in traditional finance. It is owned by eight banks. I don’t own anything there, it’s a company that does all the card processing, it’s one of the largest players in the region when it comes to that. Maybe four years ago, I went and presented to them an idea about crypto and using blockchain and their vice chairman at the time told me, listen, I don’t think we’re going to use your technology so far because it’s a bit too advanced, but we would love to have you as an independent board member with us.

So, I’ve been with them for maybe two, three years now as an independent board member from the startup or the FinTech or crypto side. So, I am part of their hiring committee, I’m part of their strategy committee, and it’s my first real board experience, which is very interesting, to be honest, because it’s so different.

I’ve never worked at a bank, but I would never want to work at a bank. MEPS, it’s a FinTech or financial company, but it is like between a bank and a startup. It’s not as big as the banks, but it’s not as fast as the startups, so it’s an interesting combination. I think MEPS has an amazing future because, basically, there’s such a big target market, you know. In Jordan, maybe 60% of people don’t have a bank account, and the way that these people will get financial services will be primarily through companies like MEPS.

Yasi: Interesting. Because when I was living in Congo, Africa, also a lot of people don’t have a bank account. And instead, they have this, you know, phone credits, they use phone credit as a sort of way of transfer money.

Talal: That’s very popular in Africa.

Yasi: My last question to you for today is where do you see the development for Jibrel Network in this year or coming years?

Talal: Oh, so, it’s my baby, it’s what I spend the most time on. We have internal metrics on where we want it to be. We’ve come up with an interesting value accrual mechanism for SLICE, which is the native token of our platform.

So, my main goal is to get SLICE to succeed, and I do believe that we have a solid offering that can allow us to do that. But the reality is crypto is still a new industry, so even if there’s a lot of hype around it, et cetera, I do think that crypto is still a new industry, so we will keep trying to innovate, keep trying to release new products that serve a market need and also contribute to the SLICE value accrual mechanisms.

So. this is like the short-term goal. The long-term goal is obviously something that’s a passion of mine, which is giving access to financial services to the masses, like democratizing access to financial services.

Yasi: Yeah. That sounds very exciting. Is that you move like the original Jibrel Network token to SLICE now?

Talal: Yes. So, we did that for several reasons because the main reason is SLICE is a lot more decentralized. The Jibrel Network token was designed for banks, for institutions, so it included stuff like the right to seize, right to freeze. They’re very centralized functions and would not work in the Defi world. So that’s why we did it.

Yasi: And I hope the audience has found something interesting and something new that I learned from you today. And lastly, if they want to find out more about Jibrel Network, tranche.finance even want to get into crypto, where can they find that information?

Talal: There’s, I mean, pretty much all the usual aspects, Twitter, LinkedIn, our website.

So tranche.finance, or Jibrel.network, these would be the two links, and you can find

Actually, the most active one is Discord. That is because Discord is more of a chat, and all of the team are active there, so probably Discord is the best place to ask questions. The best place to read is Medium. But if you go to the website, you’ll see all the social media links. And

Yasi: Yeah, I put that in the show notes.

Talal: Amazing. Thank you so much for having me, really. It’s been a pleasure.