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The co-founder of ArabianChain Mr. Mohammed Alsehli has always been an admirer of the Bitcoin and Blockchain technology even when he was still in the banking industry in KSA and then later at Microsoft. Overtime his passion fueled and ended in the creation of the first MENA Blockchain startup, ArabianChain alongside his partner Walid Messaoudi.
As AlSehli explains, “We have created a fully fledged public Blockchain platform inclusive of smart contracts. The ArabianChain Blockchain is a result of a fork out of the Ethereum platform, built on proof of work, creating a fully decentralized Blockchain.” One of the basic differentiators that will set ArabianChain from others is that it will allow developers to develop smart contracts in different languages using Thuraya, the first programming language for smart contracts in Arabic and soon to be in other languages. As AlSehli explains, “Today governments around the world want their contracts to be in their own language, because they view them as actual contracts and so we felt a need to provide that from the onset. This will be launched in December or early 2018.”
What is even more intriguing is that ArabianChain has created Arabian Studio, ArabianChain’s smart contract builder which makes it easy for anybody to build smart contracts using Artificial Intelligent Bots where you actually talk about what smart contract you want and the AI builds. Al Sehli explains, “it is coding with Artificial Intelligence, you chat with a bot and a smart contract is created.”
One of the main aims of ArabianChain is to bring Islamic banking to the Blockchain. According to Al Sehli, “ Islamic Banking assets is valued at more than $1 trillion in 2016 if we can get 10% of that it would be great and we will be the first startup to do this. Our first product auto lease using Islamic Financing, will be the first product we launch and then others will follow suit.”
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ArabianChain is also working on creating an exchange called PalmX a crypto-currency exchange. Al Sehli explained, “We will use the already existing and well mined and the number 3 in hash power DubaiCoin as our first crypto-currency to be exchanged, as well as Bitcoin, Dash and about 9-10 others. This will be launched by the end of October 2017.” As for the issue of regulations Al Sehli explains, “We will apply proper know-your-customer and AML protocols when exchanging fiat to crypto. The PalmX will also deal with tokenized cash and hence the strong relationship with the recently launched Jibril network.” He adds, “We look forward to working and partnering with other startups in Blockchain as we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. In addition Jibril is also one of our first clients.”
As for the future of Blockchain Al Sehli states, “When you ask what will happen if you don’t adopt Blockchain, I will say nothing, and nothing is very bad. Blockchain will devour the internet. Even today if the whole internet ceased to exist Blockchain would continue as we could use satellites.”
Most recently AlSehli was part of a committee discussing Blockchain in KSA and met with Saudi government which has now adopted the Blockchain into the National Digitization Strategy 2030. “We discussed with them how to proceed when it comes to Blockchain and create a national Blockchain strategy which is now being embedded as we speak into the overall Digitization Strategy.”
So it seems that ArabianChain is doing a lot with its $830,000 or 3 million AED worth of investments it received. Al Sehli, “The funds we have now will be we utilized and we won’t need any further investments at the moment but eventually we will have an ICO in the future if and when needed.”




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