Optional reading
How we do this
You do not need any of this to invest. Everywhere else on Qisma we talk about buildings, solar farms and Rands, because that is what you are buying. This page is for people who want to know what is underneath.
What we put on a blockchain
Not your money, and not your identity. What we anchor is a hash, a short fingerprint of a document. When the Sharia board signs a certificate, we compute that fingerprint and write it to a public chain.
Change one character of the certificate and the fingerprint changes completely. So anyone holding the certificate can recompute the fingerprint, compare it with the one on the chain, and know whether the document has been altered since it was signed.
What that proves, and what it does not
It proves that a specific document existed at a specific time and has not been edited since. That is genuinely useful: it means we cannot quietly rewrite a certificate after the fact, and neither can anyone else.
It does not prove the building is well managed, that the valuation is right, or that the board reached a sound conclusion. Those depend on the people who signed, which is exactly why the board is named and the valuer is named. A fingerprint on a chain is a tamper-check, not a judgement.
Your ownership is recorded in more than one place
Four registers have to agree at all times: the anchored record, our investor registry, the legal share register of the company that owns the asset, and the cash ledger. We reconcile them continuously. Any disagreement is raised within 24 hours and none is allowed to stay open past 48.
The legal register is the one that matters in a court. The chain is there so nobody, including us, can rewrite history without it being obvious.
There is no wallet for you to look after
An account is created for you and the keys are held under policy control. You will never be shown a seed phrase, asked to pay a gas fee, or told that losing a piece of paper means losing your savings. If you lose your phone, you verify who you are again and your holdings are still there.
Exporting keys is possible, but only through an identity-verified ceremony with a cooling-off period. It is deliberately not the default, because for almost everyone it is a way to lose money rather than control it.
Why bother at all
Fractional ownership of real assets has existed for a long time and has usually been opaque. The ledger does not make the assets better. It makes the record checkable by someone who does not trust us, which is the right assumption for anyone to start from.