Dubai,United Arab Emirates (UAE): ArabianChain Technology, a leading Middle Eastern innovator in the blockchain industry, said it has signed a joint venture with Dubai-and-London-based innovation firm Curiositas to create Wethaq - the world's first platform for Islamic capital markets using smart contracts and legal automation.
Wethaq will play the role of a platform-as-a-service for financial institutions, fundraisers and investors to use in the pre-sale,issuance, management and secondary trading of sukuk products.
Curiositas is an innovation firm that develops new technologies that shape finance, law and the digital economy. The objective of the joint venture is to combine Curiositas' legal automation and financial engineering expertise with ArabianChain's Distributed LedgerTechnology (DLT) Protocol and smart contracts.
Commenting on the venture, Dimitrios Vourakis, Managing Director of Curiositas,said: “Our platform matters as there is an urgent need for automation and standardization in Islamic capital markets. Financial institutions, fundraisers and investors incur substantial operational costs and third-party charges in Islamic capital markets and face more complexity and intermediaries than those encountered in conventional markets. Wethaq separates the essential structuring services provided by financial institutions from additional services such as custodianship, and payments, and offers the latter on its automated platform.”
For a competitively priced success fee, clients will be able to use Wethaq's comprehensive and standardized platform for the entire lifecycle of their sukuk product.The platform's target customers include financial institutions,investment banks, lawyers, auditors, ratings agencies, accredited investors and fundraisers. Wethaq is expected to see issuance of its first Smart Ijara in the first half of 2019.
ArabianChain founder and CEO Mohammed Alsehli said: “This is first ever global venture using frontier technology in Islamic Capital markets and we believe that the Islamic finance ecosystem will benefit from this transparent, efficient and competitively priced platform. Due to its rigorous compliance and increased transparency, we expect both international investors and more conservative Islamic investors will consider investing in sukuk products through Wethaq. We expect the Islamic capital markets to embrace Wethaq across the globe and we have already received great interest fromIslamic financial institutions in the region who would be keen to use our platform once launched.”
Alsehli is a prominent figure in Islamic finance and was listed amongst Islamica's top 500 who make the Islamic Economy at the 11th World Islamic Economic Forum in Kuala Lumpur this year.
About Curiositas
Curiositas is an innovation firm with offices in Dubai and London. The firm researches and develops new technologies that shape law, finance and the digital economy. Its team of lawyers, technologists, and financial analysts work with corporate innovation labs, entrepreneurs and investors to promote automation and bring efficiencies in the financial and legal sectors. For more information please visit: www.wethaq.io
About ArabianChain
Based in the UAE, KSA and Bahrain, ArabianChain is the leading MiddleEastern innovator in the blockchain industry. The company enables governments, enterprises, startups and individuals to use blockchain-based tools and languages to build and record their transactions and contracts on its platform. ArabianChain is the founder of the first public and decentralized blockchain in the region along with DubaiCoin (DBIX), which works as the fuel ofArabianChain. For more information please visit www.arabianchain.org
For regular updates on ArabianChain and Curiositas, follow us on Twitter:
@arabianchain, @curiositas0
For press enquiries and interview requests, please contact: media@blockchainmiddleeast.com or call + 971 50 803 4064.
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