Wafr Launches Sukuk Blockchain With Backing From Tyme's Coen Jonker and Ex-DBS Neal Cross

Wafr has launched WafrChain, a private, permissioned blockchain for Shariah-compliant sukuk, with tokenisation live from the start. It is the company's first product, released after a pre-seed round whose backers include Coen Jonker, co-founder of Tyme Group, and Neal Cross, formerly chief innovation officer at DBS Bank.

The problem Wafr is targeting is structural. A single sukuk issue can pull in eight parties, each keeping its own record of the same deal. Transfers and profit payments get re-keyed and reconciled across all of them. That adds cost and delay, and it adds the risk of error.

WafrChain replaces those parallel ledgers with one shared record. Before a sukuk is sold, its terms — carrying the issuer's Shariah board approval — are stored on the chain. Smart contracts then route profit payments. Settlement can run in fiat through SWIFT and local real-time gross settlement systems, or in stablecoins. Wafr puts finality at 300 milliseconds per transaction. Participants see only their own activity, so positions stay private.

"WafrChain is our starting point" for moving Shariah-compliant assets on-chain, said Mahmoud Bouchelif, Wafr's co-founder and CEO. He said the company intends to build services for managing financial lives across borders.

Cross said Wafr is one of few teams "starting with the customers who need it most." He argued that Islamic finance's trust, transparency and shared risk line up with how blockchains work.

starting with the customers who need it most.

Next on the roadmap: tokenised funds and deposits, trade finance, and consumer accounts, remittances and cards, the last of these subject to regulatory approval.

Sukuk is an odd place to begin, and that may be the point. The instrument's costs sit in coordination between parties, which a shared ledger attacks directly. Consumer accounts and cards will be measured against a different benchmark.