Bitmal

Bitmal  aims at creating an ecosystem that helps members of unprivileged communities to become stakeholders of  issues as opposed to being a stand-byer or a recipient of a service. It aims at mobilizing the whole community to become problem solvers. 

BIitmal would allow for greater integration of unprivileged community by recognizing them for their active engagement and enabling  them to gain skills, build expertise establish and scale their enteprrises:

- gain skills by earning rewards as they volunteer

-  encourage them to establish and scale their enterprise by using Bitmal earned and procuring goods and services from marketplace

- recruit and reward members experts, members and volunteers by rewarding them with Bitmals

By scaling Bitmal, it would build an ecosystem and marketplaces that supports communities across the world that would support each other, enable transfer of expertise and knowledge and greater engagement

1-In light of Covid-19, many  lost their sources of income whereby the majority work in the informal economy. According to ILO,  52% of Syrian refugees in Jordan work in the informal economy and  35% lost their jobs .  At a global level, 1.6 billion informal economy workers are not able  to earn a living as they work in the hard hitest industry

2- Lack of consistent access to funding to form and scale their enterprises due to:

•  low level of financial inclusion 

•  Misallocation of funds: with more than $502 Billion in impact investments globally, limited access to funds is not attributed to lack of available funds but mostly to misallocation of funds. This is attributed to the fact that members of the communities are not  consulted as to where funds should be allocated to optimize impact. 

• Reluctance of investors to fund these enterprises as they perceive them as being characterized by small average deal size with  high costs of assessing impact 

3- To overcome difficult living conditions, members of these  communities volunteer to support each other. However, volunteers’ work is not systematically tracked and rewarded. 

Bitmal is an  integrated socio-economic system  enabled by a Blockchain infrastructure that attributes an economic value, through its social currency token ( Bitmal), to impactful contributions. It features a rewards mechanism and an intrinsic social scoring system that optimizes impact on local communities by enabling its members to earn and transfer  Bitmals  currency  to enterprises that have the most appealing value proposition and to the most engaged members of the community. 

Through its social currency token (Bitmal), it:

•  Rewards members of the community actively contributing with their skills and talents and enables  them  to use Bitmals earned to:

  • fund social enterprises, organizations and initiatives the community needs the most 

  • earn rewards through the Bitmal Market place that would allow them to further gain expertise and skills

• Allows social enterprises/organizations to scale by using Bitmals earned to procure goods and services from the Bitmal Marketplace

• Allows donors  to optimize allocation of funds by financing social project/ enterprises that the community identifies as having the most appealing value proposition.

BItmal solution serves and cater different segments and strata of the population as to build an ecosystem that would better support local communities. We will walk you through process we use to deploy our first pilot to explain our modus operandi. 

our first POC  was deployed with Ruwwad, an organization that works with disenfranchised communities through volunteerism in Jordan. 

Pilot was greatly impactful as it has onboarded more than 100 members of the community which included:

- 17 women who led 7 initiatives

- more than80 young professional and university students.

We worked closely with local coordinators whom  were recruited from local community to raise awareness about the theory of change and to onboard  members of the community.  The purpose of the pilot was to understand community’s adoption of the Bitmal concept and to capture user experience through 2 phases.  Pilot was developed over two phases: In a first phase Volunteers were:

•  rewarded with Bitmals  for their volunteering work

•  transferred Bitmals earned to organizations  of their choice. 

 In a second phase, organizations recruited volunteers and rewarded them with Bitmals once they completed their tasks

Bitmal fully aligns with the challenge as it does through its theory of change, its business model and disruptive technology meet the goal of the Challenge .

Bitmal ecosystem will enable members of unprivileged communities to :

- earn rewards and  gain skills through marketplace that would send an indirect signal to future employers as they gain expertise and earn reputation

- be able to establish their own enterprises by using bitmal currency

Bitmal theory  of change has proven to be successful whereby a proof of concept was deployed with local community of refugees and bottom of the pyramid Jordanians-  

 While there are many  of ventures that reward and incentivize members of communities for their work or funnel donations to organizations, and crowdfunding platform , Bitmal is unique in that it  introduces a new framework to operate within. It introduces a blockchain based system and a marketplace that connects supply and demand sides of contributions in a systematic manner while measuring impact,  building trust and reputation.  It builds an integrated ecosystem that provides a  disruptive  fintech solution  as it ;

-       Incentivizes community contributions through social scoring

-       Enables community to decide on allocation of resources through Bitmal Social Currency

-       Brings together entrepreneurs, experts, donors  and  members of the community allowing them to gain skills & scale through Bitmal Marketplace

-       Increases accountability & traceability of funding through Blockchain Technology

Technology Infrastructure;

Mobile App: iOS (Swift)

Web (Front-end): Angular7

Web (Back-end): NodeJS

Database: MySQL

Cloud Platform: Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Server Located in EU-Frankfurt Region.

Blockchain: Stellar

The system has the least vulnerability to attacks because of the secure AWS architecture and Stellar Blockchain’s Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA). Core configurations are automated with multiple checks for authentication; including automated deployment configurations. In terms of technical assessment, the answers to previous questions suffice. And, even when the system is in test mode (or beta), the same level of security is applied as on the live version (including mainnet of Stellar). The system has gone through unit, load & stress testing, and been applied external server hits for cyber attacks during testing, but the system has proved out to be shielded well because of its secure architecture.

We have a white paper that we can share with the jury but can not disclose publicly 

We have developed two beta version of the platform- a web platform and a mobile one- Bitmal Applications built on old technology stacks have operational risks especially in terms of optimizations. BitMal’s back-end however is written in NodeJS, a modernized tech stack which is constantly evolving and is being used in highly robust applications. Moreover, technology used for server side and cloud storage is AWS, one of the most secure cloud architectures of today, which allows server backups, time-to-time database snapshots & time-triggered automated tasks. Database resides on a private network and is not publicly accessible. In addition to this, BitMal comprises of one of the most secure blockchain platforms for micro transactions i.e. Stellar, ensuring 

ensuring transparency & secure data-storage on the public ledger, which cannot be tampered

Cyber-Security Risks: Cyber security risks are high in terms of completely centralized systems, which once compromised, can be very difficult to deal with. Whereas BitMal comprises of a decentralized system (via Blockchain) to store records of entire transactions taking place in the ecosystem. Moreover, only public keys of users’ wallets are saved in the private centralized blockchain, and private keys are shared directly with the users. User passwords and sensitive information are all encrypted.

ML & TF Risks: BitMal cannot be used for money laundering and illegal activities since all transactions are transparent and monitored. 

We aim at achieving activities, outputs and longer term outcomes

Encourage community contributions

• Increase in the number of volunteering hours and value of voluntarism

• Increase in the number of volunteers

• Increase in the engagement of volunteers

Incentivize scaling and formation of enterprises

• Increase in the number of projects and enterprises

• Costs of running and  funding enterprises are decreasing

Encourage decentralization by outsourcing the decision making process to the community of volunteers and build the ecosystem

• Volunteers have an urge to re-donate the BitMals to support Social Enterprises/Start-ups

• Streamlining of process flow through the ecosystem with minimal bottlenecks

For instance for the pilot: 

We achieved following outcomes:

Results achieved:

• Number of volunteering hours  increased from 105 hours in phase one  to 163 hours  in phase two

- Number  of Bitmals transferred from volunteers to organizations increased from 65% to 69%

• 17% of volunteers volunteered again in phase 2

• Number of entrepreneurs increased from 12 to 17 and number of volunteers increased by 50%

2020: 200

in three years: 2000

in five years: 5000

Our main goal next year:

- at this stage  we want to develop an MVP and a full fledge platform

- develop ,, build and scale the  ecosystem and marketplace and include other use cases as to adjust different markets and segments based on local needs

In the medium to longer term:

- We want to impact community across different countries and bring them together by partnering and onboarding different organizations and deploying a proprietary technology on digital ID

- Bitmal currency token to evolve from a reputation token to a utility one

Main Barrier this year:

-We need to ensure that we abide by central banks regulation on KYC and digital ID which are restrictive in certain countries and makes it challenging- 

- beta versions of the platform are useful to test but are limiting as we want to onboard more users and scale 

- Building and scaling marketplace is challenging

In the medium to longer term main challenges is to address issues related to cross boarder transmissions of funds as we scale to different countries-  

This year barrier

-We are applying to Central Bank Sandbox in some countries as to better address  some of challenges and aim to adopt a propriteray technology on Digital Identity 

- deploy a full fledge platform and we hope to secure funding through MIT solve to help us build it

-  We would want to potential build marketplace through partnership

Medium to long term barrier

We will be working on address it this challenge with lawyers and on adopting /partnering on proprietary technology to address it

Full Time Staff: 2

Part time staff: 2

Contractor: 3

Shared strategic vision and passion to provide innovative  solution to support community development.  Team members share the believe that Bitmal would bring positive impact. They complement each other in level of expertise and experience- 

Redha and myself are two co-founders, we were class mates at Harvard kennedy School and have been working together since we graduated in 2014

On the technology side, Christian Smith is our lead advisory- He is the co-founder of Stranger Labs-  Prior to this he  led a team of research engineers at MIT Connection Science and was an invited expert on Solid at MIT CSAIL. At Anvil Research, he implemented standards like OpenID Connect, JOSE, and Web Cryptography API. An advocate of reasoning from first principles, Christian is unafraid to defy the wisdom of the crowd in pursuit of genuine innovation. He believes technology should serve people, not exploit them, and that one ought to be authentic and have integrity to work on code of consequence. When he's not trying to herd smarter nerds and torturing the Rust compiler, Christian imitates virtuosic South American guitarists poorly.

 Dr. Usmani is advising us on the technology side,  He is a Fulbright Scholar and Eisenhower Fellow. His research strengths include data sciences, artificial intelligence,predictive analytics, and modeling human

 On token metrics, we have a contractor- Techchain advisory   

• Bitmal pilot was selected by the World Bank Group (WBG)  SME Launchpad competition as one of 7 out of 75 proposals and received advisory support to develop the first beta version in close collaboration with WBG Blockchain Lab 

• Bitmal was selected by Georgetown University Law Center as a case study for the spring semester in 2018

• Bitmal received a grant by the Saudi Telecom Company

• in a residency program with a leading financial institution 

• Bitmal was presented at :

• 1- the outskirt of the World Bank Group Annual meeting in Washington DC as part of youth Summit in fall 2018

• 2- As part of the World Bank Group S4YE Partner Summit: Using Digital Technology to create employment opportunities for vulnerable youth 

• 3- International Volunteer Forum Russia 2019 

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our value proposition to different segments we cater for:

1-  members of community/volunteers:

They will:

- gain reputation and earn recognition which would send an indirect signal to employers

- gain expertise as they contribute to different enterprises

- be able to save Bitmals which they can use to establish their enterprise

- Track impact of their contributions

- Contribute to the decision making process as to where to allocate Bitmals as to optimize impact

2- Enterprises 

- they will be able to scale by procuring goods and services from  market place

- recruit and reward members of community with Bitmals

- Tap into a wide pool of mentors and experts beyond geographical limitation of the country

- be able to measure their impact on the community

3- Donors/funders

-optimize impact as Bitmals will be funneled to most impactful projects

- trace and track funds as to increase accountability, transparency and limit corruption 

- trace and track impact

We aim to be self sustainable but we would need funding in the initial stage through grants and equity and we develop our MPV and secure clients we will charge the following which would generate revenue generation stream in the longer term

1-We will charge administrative fees at cash in and cash out of Bitmal and on the Marketplace-

2- structured deal with white label solution

3- trade token

We look for Solve 's support to connect to partners and mentors that would help us develop our platform, refine business model and be able to scale our solution as to achieve greater impact

We would need support to scale our technology to be able to onboard more users and scale the model and adjust to different use case as the theory of change is scalable and impactful

MIT Facult and Solve partners including World Bank Group

AS mentioned we have developed a POC with refugees and would require support to scale our model and onboard more refugees across the world 

It is in full alignment with our model and a partnership will help us scale our solution and better support many access jobs, acquire skills and be able to become active members of the community

Bitmal will positively impact lives of thousands across the world as the model is scalable and impactful