The Middle East and North Africa is vast and diverse region with a population of
over 700 million people of which 85% is unbanked, and over two billion people
worldwide who do not have bank accounts or even have access to one. Unable to
participate in the global marketplace, the Middle East has a highest percentage of
unbanked than any other region, even Sub-Saharan Africa bank account holders
are almost double that rate. World Coin Network aims to bring stability to the
Middle East with a three pronged approach - Currency Stability, Lending Platform,
National Coins and Charity.
Many of the problems in the Middle East all lead back to currency devaluation.
None of the issues will be fixed in the region unless currency and banking issues
are addressed. World Coin Network (WCN) aim is to fix these problems and also
give back in major way
Currency devaluation is the main destabilizing force in the Middle East. How do
you start a business or forecast when prices in many countries can spike weekly
or monthly 10-20%. How do you save? How do you plan? Things we take for
granted in the west. World Coin Network (WCN) wants to fix this problem with
unique a coin and a unique network. The Middle East is still a cash economy, and
we want to help facilitate a Network that can boost trade, while also creating jobs
and stabilizing the region.
Events like the 2008 financial crisis often lead some individuals to distrust the
financial institutions due to their fallible nature and the interconnectedness of the
banking sector with non-banking sectors [1]. Electronic payments, which are the
backbone of the global economy, depend almost exclusively on banking
institutions to act as trusted third parties. While this system is sufficient for most
transactions, it still suffers from the fundamental weaknesses of the trust-based
model. Before the release of bitcoin in 2009, completely non-reversible
transactions were not actually possible because the financial institutions could not
avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation inflates transaction fees, limiting
the minimum practical transaction size and removing the possibility for small
everyday transactions; and there is a broader cost in the loss of the ability to make
non-reversible payments for non-reversible services. With the potential for
reversal, the need for trust grows. Sellers must be wary of their buyers, requesting
that they provide more information than they would otherwise need. Financial
institutions accept a certain percentage of fraud as unavoidable. These costs and
payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, yet
they cannot be avoided on the Internet without the assistance of cryptocurrencies
[2].
Due to limited banking infrastructure in the Middle East, internet transactions in
the region rely heavily on foreign banks, which means transaction costs negatively
affect the region’s economy. While the region does have some banks, none of the
world’s largest banks are located in the Middle East [3]. Growth in the region is
hindered by the limitations of their banking infrastructure and the economic
outlook looks bleak due to the world’s reliance on oil slowly waning. Furthermore,
there are many cultural/religious laws in the Middle East that restrict the
development of their financial institutions and make it difficult for them to
compete with their non-native peers abroad. Most of these restrictive laws stem
from Islamic law (sharia), which prohibits profitable banking practices such as
paying or charging interest, charging additional amounts for late payments, and
securities trading that involves gambling or excessive risk (i.e. margin trading,
short selling, day trading, and derivatives like forwards, futures, options, and
swaps). Other restrictions include that Islamic banks, according to some sources,
must collect zakat (obligatory religious alms) from customers and that banking
practices must be risk sharing [4]. Given these rules, common credit and lending
practices in the region are scarce, with few banks and financial institutions offering
credit cards. Everyday digital transactions have instead come to rely on debit
cards; however, debit cards are not risk sharing because all of the risk of fraud is
garnered by the banks. Some banking systems in the Middle East attempt to
circumvent these cultural laws by lacking candor and transparency, but a trustless
transparent system is needed to be adopted by the majority of the Middle-Eastern
populace. Due to all of these reasons, local transactions and cross-border trade
are most commonly carried out in physical cash/currency, which is extremely risky
for the locals and traders. What is needed is a method for replicating these
physical transactions in a digital medium. World Coin Network solves all of these
issues because our tokens act as a digital representation of physical cash
transactions. World Coin Network uses a sharia-compliant financial system based
on a decentralized trustless blockchain network that shares the risk amongst its
users. This network is a means for transparent peer-to-peer transactions, whereby
all transactions are recorded online in a public distributed-ledger system. Because
World Coin Network transactions are secured using cryptography, tampering with
them is computationally impossible. Lastly, because many individuals in the
Middle East have limited access to the Internet, we will be opening physical
branches in every country in the Middle East to provide people with a means to
send/receive World Coin Network tokens and to exchange tokens for the local
currency of their choice. We believe our cryptocurrency platform will enable
increased trade in the Middle East and boost the region’s economy, sparking a
new age of innovation, growth, and development.
Background Information
A cryptocurrency is a digital asset developed to function as a medium of exchange
using cryptography to secure the transactions [5, 6]. Cryptocurrencies are
virtual/digital currencies, existing on the servers hosted around the world. Bitcoin,
the world’s first successful cryptocurrency, was announced in 2008 by its
pseudonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto in his (or her) whitepaper Bitcoin: A
Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Bitcoin was then developed and released the
following year. Satoshi describes bitcoin as an electronic payment system based
on a cryptographic proof instead of trust. Bitcoin transactions are computationally
impractical to reverse, protecting sellers from fraud. Bitcoin uses a peer-to-peer
distributed timestamp server to create a computational proof of the chronological
order of transactions. This system is secure as long as miner nodes collectively
control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes [2].
Miners are members of the general public that are given incentive to use their
computers processing power to help verify, timestamp, and add transactions to
the public ledger. Each computer system operating on this network is known as a
node. The proposed “peer-to-peer distrusted timestamp server” mentioned by
Satoshi Nakamoto is referred to today as a blockchain. A blockchain is essentially
a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured
using cryptography [7].
Electronic money has been the focal point of financial technology research for
over the past twenty years due to the complexity of the double-spending problem
[8]. There are two types of electronic money: currency and deposits. Electronic
currency, which is also referred to as digital currency, is an asset that can be
transferred from person-to-person over a virtual medium and is evidenced by a
ledger kept by the owner of the currency. Electronic deposits can be defined as
money which is evidenced by a ledger at a financial institution and this money is
a liability of that institution [9]. Before bitcoin, the entire world depended on
banks and bank deposits simply because there were no viable electronic
currencies available due to the complexity of the double-spending problem. The
essence of the double-spending problem is that digital information can be easily
replicated and therefore could be spent again (or double). For instance, handing
out a dollar in-person is not translatable to e-mailing a picture of a dollar, because
pictures and all other types of digital data are nothing more than a string of binary
code. This string of code is called a bit string, which is most often seen as a series
of 0’s and 1’s, and these individual digits are referred to as bits; hence the name
bitcoin.
As the popularity of bitcoin grew, developers began taking bitcoin’s open-source
code and started using it for their own cryptocurrencies. All these subsequent
coins are referred to as altcoins (alternate coins). While the use of the bitcoin
blockchain is limited to the creating and tracking of bitcoins, the Ethereum
blockchain is used to create and track ether1 as well as over 20,0002 other tokens
(which can be cryptocurrencies, cryptocurrency-based businesses, and other
decentralized applications3
) operating on the Ethereum platform. Despite the
enormous size of the Ethereum platform, the average transaction time of ether
of about ten minutes to complete, whereas ether and the cryptocurrencies
operating on the Ethereum platform have an average transaction time of about
0.23 minutes, which is roughly 14 seconds [10, 11]. Faster transaction times are
one of many advantages that Ethereum (and our token) have over bitcoin.
Ethereum and World Coin Network transactions are also significantly cheaper
than bitcoin transactions. Satoshi Nakamoto created bitcoin in hopes of having
cheaper transaction fees than bank transactions, yet the average transaction fee
of bitcoin is over 55 USD and these fees are growing exponentially, whereas the
average transaction fee of ether (and the World Coin Network token) is only one
dollar per transaction [12].
Our Company
World Coin Network, is a financial services business that will help banks integrate
the World Coin Network tokens and infrastructure into current banking systems
and that will be opening local branches and automated teller machines (ATMs)
where individuals can exchange World Coin Network tokens with local currencies
and can send/receive our tokens. Strategic partnerships with these local branches,
will generate a profit from exchange fees for the network. Although World Coin
Network will be allocating a portion of our profits for zakat. We will be donating
20% of our transaction fees to non-profit educational charities in the Middle East.
We believe helping underprivileged children, receive a proper education will
inevitability help their families break the circle of poverty. The other 80% of our
profits will be reinvested back into the coin or kept as cash reserves to be shariacompliant.
Our employees will not be provided a salary, instead they will be paid
in tokens, which is why we have a have allotted a large portion of tokens for staff
members. This payment structure invests our employees in the project, so their
compensation grows with the success of the World Coin Network. To keep the
price of our tokens stable, all of our employees will have staggered lockup periods
ranging from 6 months to 2 years. Lockup periods will prevent employees from
selling tokens all at once and negatively affecting the token price. All sales of staff
member tokens will be announced via our e-mail subscription, and employees will
have limitations to the amount that they can sell in one month.
We will also be establishing a sharia advisory council to ensure that our operations
remain sharia-compliant. Our platform will also include a digital wallet application
for smartphones and computers, Sharia compliant lending platform, a cash
reserve system, blockchain banknotes, escrow services, physical exchanges for
transferring fiat to digital currencies, and ultimately, we will be opening our own
public digital currency exchange websites where we can monitor transactions to
prevent fraud. We believe that the World Coin Network will improve the lives of
hundreds of millions of Middle-Eastern people, so we are striving to make our
business as transparent as possible to aid it its adoption. All of our technology,
including the World Coin Network token, will undergo both internal and external
security audits. Also, our company will have an open-book policy, whereby
investors can request quarterly reports of our accounts, transactions, and
operations. As our platform is still in its earliest stages of development, we are
actively searching for strategic corporate partnerships and investors, as well as
hiring financial consultants/executives, software developers, and other
information technology (IT) personnel.
Partner Coins and Exchanges
Local World Coin Network exchanges will be set up in each country creating a
partnerships with local businesses, and current money exchanger’s, building on
current infrastructures, and while forging a valuable network with local
populations. Local traders who want to protect their cash assets will finally have
an alternative to their potentially-depreciating local currencies.
World Coin Network has a feature that allows us to create new partner coins and
integrate them within the World Coin Network. Helping spread digital currency
across the Middle East and rapidly expand the reach of WCN.
We have already acquired hundreds of domains for future partners and will be
releasing them as we gain new partners. Our regional partners will gain access to
our entire platform, apps, lending, and exchanges. WCN token holders will also
receive a percentage of each new coin minted, creating value for WCN token
holders long term while expanding our network across the Middle East.
Our Partner Coins will allow each coin to conform specifically to the countries
financial policies, so that they are able to operate legally. These coins, combined
with our physical branches, will provide ample access to cryptocurrency and will
drive demand for the World Coin Network. Here is a list of the 14 website domains
that we have reserved for our current partners:
Lending Platform – Job Creation
In order to facilitate trade and create jobs World Coin Network will create a lending platform.
WCN will be holding 15% of our tokens for the lending platform, we plan to give loans to under
privileged people to start in-home businesses, open up store fronts, or web businesses. Our
loans will be from 100 to 10,000 WCN tokens and we expect to generate between 50,000 to
100,000 WCN loans in a year.
Small loans have the ability to change people’s lives in many countries especially women who
don’t have access to the banking system. 85% of the Middle East is unbanked and World Coin
Network could become the bridge for them. We want to establish WCN as the banking system
of the unbanked and merchants who can’t access the traditional banking world. By giving out
loans in WCN Tokens we will also be building out our Network. Imagine within a year tens of
thousands of stores and websites all accepting WCN, while also getting lending help from us.
Our lending platform will be interest free. We will follow Sharia law guidelines, and become
partners in these new businesses. By being partners, we will give the business owners the
choice, they can select to buy us out at any time or just continue being 20% partners and paying
WCN a share of the profits each month. Our lending platform will also give a credit score and
ranking to each member, as the membership grows anyone who owns WCN Tokens can loan
them to a business or individual to start a business or expand an established one. The credit
ratings will provide a score and level of risk each loan takes on.
With 85% of the Middle East being unbanked World Coin Network sees a massive opportunity.
Not only could we become the leading digital currency in the Middle East but we can create
jobs and stabilize the region where unemployment is 25%-40% in many countries. Our vision is
to bring stability and commerce, to an untapped market. This market has the potential to be a
huge windfall. To bring stability you need to create jobs, and the best way we can to this is to
empower the disenfranchised population. WCN will help create jobs, stabilize, and it will also
extend the World Coin Network around the region. Think of the lending platform as a second
ICO to hundreds of thousands of small merchants. All of WCN token holders receiving loans,
must also accept WCN coins as a form of payment, thus creating a community that depends on
the World Coin Network.
In most cases WCN coins will be the merchant’s largest asset, thus we will become the best and
most fully integrated digital currency in that region. Our lending platform will propel millions of
unbacked people into a new digital era. As token holders of WCN also come into the peer2peer
lending platform, lending coins will boost community integration and increase the rate at which
WCN can grow. The lending platform will accelerate our penetration into an untapped market
and create a large network of websites and businesses across the region that will start creating
jobs and stabilizing the region.
Philanthropic Goals- WCN Charity
Keeping with our ideals of creating a stable and prosperous Middle East, we will be allocating a
portion of our profits for Zakat (charitable tradition). We will be donating 20% of our
transaction fees to non-profit educational charities in the Middle East. We believe helping
underprivileged children, receive a proper education will inevitability help their families break
the circle of poverty. The other 80% of our profits will be reinvested back into WCN, or kept as
cash reserves to be sharia-compliant.
Our Token
The World Coin Network token is a sustainable public cryptocurrency coin written
in Solidity, which is a high-level programming language influenced by C++, Python,
and JavaScript. Our token is a basic open-source ERC20 token, operating on the
Ethereum platform’s smart contract protocol. World Coin Network transactions
are executed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), a decentralized Turingcomplete
virtual machine that executes scripts using Ethereum’s global network
of public nodes. Our token will be backed by a basket of Middle-Eastern tokens in
the World Coin Network fund. Transactions of our token can be performed on
exchanges, as well as by using the following wallets: Mist, MyEtherWallet, or
Metamask.
4
Construction Parameters
Token Code
The code for our token is available for download on GitHub. Once the contracts
have been deployed, we will republish this code under our companies GitHub,
which is where we will post the source code for all of our projects. For an in-depth
explanation of the code, we encourage you to read the section on Ethereum’s
website titled “UNDERSTAND THE CODE”, which can be found at:
Token Sale Details
Our initial coin offering (ICO) is split into three phases: Pre-ICO, Round A and
Round B. The difference between the phases is that:
Pre-ICO, the price is $0.14 per token.
Round A, the price is $0.21 per token.
Round B, the price is $0.29 per token.
For all phases, investments greater than $10,000 will be given a 20% token
Bounty bonus. For information on the length/dates of our ICO, please refer
to our timeline, in section 2.4.
Half of the proceeds from the presale will be dedicated to a cash reserve account,
whereby early adopters and presale investors can request up to 50% of their
money back in case prices falls below ICO purchases. Approved requests, can
receive funds up to two years, but no sooner than six months, after the launch on
exchanges. To purchase tokens, please follow the instructions our website. The
following lists the allocation of the 100-million World Coin Network tokens:
30% of the tokens will be sold during the presale/ICO periods.
2.5% of the tokens will be reserved for our Referral Rewards.
2.5% of the tokens will be reserved for our Bounty Programs.
15% of the tokens will be Reserved and offered after the platform
launches. They will be sold to local financial institutions, digital and
physical currency exchanges, as well strategic corporate partnerships.
These institutional investors will be given incentive to hold their positions
indefinitely.
15% of the tokens will be
allotted for the Lending
platform, where we will
be giving between
50,000 to 100,000
business partnership
loans.
15% of the tokens will
be offered for founders,
advisors and team
members. These tokens will
have all have a staggered 6-
month to 2-year lockup period
associated with them. Investors will be notified via e-mail when any of
these tokens are sold.
20% of the tokens are allotted for other expenses (Operations, Legal,
Public Relations, Marketing, Consulting, Development, Technical Support,
and Security Audits, etc.). If these tokens are given to full-time, then they
will have a lockup period associated with them. Tokens distributed to
temporary employees or freelancers will not have a lockup period,
however, our company will be incentivizing them to hold long-term.
The token distribution provides our company (initially) with the majority of the
tokens, so that we may use them as incentive for institutions and employees to
join our project. In the next one to two years, we predict that the amount of
tokens that our company and staff controls will be less than 20%. And, in the
course of the next five to ten years, we predict our company and staff will hold
less than 10% of all the 100-million tokens, allowing the price to be dictated by
the free market. The World Coin Network plans to keep the supply of tokens fixed,
however, we do retain the ability to burn tokens held by the company, enviably
increasing total value of all coins. This ability will only be used if there is a viable
reason to do so, and the World Coin Network investors and community will be
consulted before any such action is taken. For transparency sake, the supply of
tokens can always be tracked on Etherscan (once the coin goes live and trading
begins).
Timeline
Below is a representation of our timeline for the next 1-2 of years. To be notified
of any changes to our schedule, please subscribe to our e-mail updates:
ICO and World Coin Network deployment
we will roll out World Coin Network after our ICO for initial coin usage and open market
trading.
we will roll out World Coin Network after our ICO for initial coin usage and open market
trading.
Develop a platform for National Exchanges
we will also immediately start development on our platform, featuring security minded
coding and not relying on existing security infrastructures. (This is for exchanging tokens
(AED <-> AEDT).
We will then start to deploy our local markets country-by-country.
The order of country deployment will be determined by initial demand and further
market research etc. We will then create an exchange on top of the
platform developed on step 2; this will be our own Middle East mini exchange for our
token holders to use. Then we can develop partnerships with local banks to
store fiat reserves. All the banks we work with will help us in our quarterly investor
screened audits of cash reserves on hand… (If only everyone did this!) We will then link
the cash with the documents referenced in blockchain correspondence to the actual real
money transactions.
We will then begin working with Kyber (parallel to 3)
to create a unique (non-market exchange reliant) token exchange service for easy
conversions between national tokens and World Coin Network.
During this time we will be developing a mobile app (parallel to 2, 3 and 4)
which will allow token holders to store national tokens and convert them to/from
national currencies and to/from World Coin Network. This will allow people to send
tokens and World Coin Network to friends
6. Working with Merchants
We then shift our focus on working with merchants to help them accept national tokens
and World Coin Network for their services and goods. Creating a platform which they can
easily integrate into their existing businesses.
References
1. Tuomas A. Peltonen, M.R., Peter Sarlin, Interconnectedness of the banking
sector as a vulnerability to crises. Working Paper Series, 2015(No 1866).
2. Nakamoto, S., Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.
3. List of largest banks. 2017; Available from:
4. Islamic banking and finance. 2017; Available from:
5. Schueffel, P., The Concise Fintech Compendium. 2017.
6. Chohan, U.W., Cryptocurrencies- A Brief Thematic Review. 2017.
7. Blockchain. 2017, Wikipedia.
8. Wayner, P., Digital Cash: Commerce on the Net. 2nd Edition ed. 1997: Morgan
Kaufmann.
9. Dwyer, G.P., The economics of Bitcoin and similar private digital currencies.
Journal of Financial Stability, 2015. 17: p. 81-91.
10. BitInfoCharts. Bitcoin, Ethereum Block Time chart. 2017; Available from:
11. Etherscan. 2017; Etherscan is a Block Explorer and Analytics Platform for
Ethereum, a decentralized smart contracts platform.]. Available from:
12. Bitcoin, Ethereum Avg. Transaction Fee historical chart. 2017; Available from:
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