Mizan — The Akhirah Portfolio

مِيزان — A streamlined portfolio account for the next life.

Inspiration

Every Muslim grows up with two balance sheets. The first — savings, 401(k), and stocks — has a trillion-dollar industry dedicated to maximizing its returns. The second is the one that actually matters: the Mizan, the scale on which deeds will be weighed on the Day of Judgment.

The problem is not that Islamic giving lacks value — it is that the instruments that build the second balance sheet live scattered across GoFundMe links, mosque WhatsApp groups, and Venmo screenshots.

We built Mizan around a simple idea: what if every act of sadaqah, every qard hassan loan, every jariyah commitment could be treated like a position in a real portfolio? Mizan turns giving from a vague intention into a clear, tracked, compoundable asset class.

What it does

Mizan is an AI-powered Islamic finance platform that treats sadaqah, qard hassan, and sadaqah jariyah as portfolio instruments — with live positions, compounding cycles, and a 3D impact globe showing where every dollar has physically reached.

The platform spans four account types — Personal Portfolio, Loan Account, Community Hub (for masjids), and NGO Dashboard — each with its own dashboard but all sharing a single underlying ledger.

In practice, Mizan helps users answer:

What is the current value of my Akhirah Portfolio?
Which causes match my values and where has my money actually reached?
How can my mosque formalize its welfare, zakat, and qard hassan operations?
How do NGOs retain donors and acknowledge every gift at scale?

How we built it

We built Mizan as a full-stack Islamic finance intelligence system.

On the frontend, we used JavaScript and Mapbox GL to create a dark-mode, serif-forward interface anchored by a live 3D impact globe that makes the product feel closer to a private banking app than a donation form.

On the backend, a JavaScript service layer handles loan qualification, pool allocation, cycle settlement, and lapse-risk scoring. Claude API powers the AI layer end-to-end — applicant parsing, cause matching, acknowledgment drafting, memorial-sensitive impact narratives, and auto-generated mosque reports.

The multimodal pipeline works like this:

Donor commits capital → selects Direct, Compound, or Jariyah mode
If Compound: capital enters the qard hassan pool and is tier-allocated to a borrower
Repayments cycle back, or convert to sadaqah on default (circle-voted)
Capital lands at destination NGO → Acknowledgment Engine drafts thank-you → Impact Globe updates
If tagged to a Jariyah Vault: memorial page adds an impact entry in the deceased's name

Novelty

What makes Mizan different is that it is not just a donation app, not just a peer-lending platform, and not just an AI wrapper on top of existing charities.

Our novelty comes from combining portfolio abstraction, 3D geospatial visualization, AI-driven operations and an AI automation layer, and Islamic-finance primitive stacking into one continuous system.

Mizan stands out in four major ways:

The Akhirah Portfolio abstraction. No existing product gives Muslims a live portfolio view of their lifetime good-deed positions with composition, impact rate, and active vs. perpetual breakdowns.

3D Mapbox Impact Globe. We use the Mapbox GL globe projection to render every active position as a geolocated node on a live rotating world, color-coded by cause (Crisis / Water / Food / Borrower) with animated paths from donor city to destination country. Users don't just see a number — they see their sadaqah physically reaching eight countries at once.

Full AI automation layer for NGOs. Our NGO Dashboard ships two always-on AI engines. The Acknowledgment Engine profile-enriches every donation and has Claude draft a personalized thank-you through a live pipeline (Donation received → Profile enriched → Claude drafts → Admin review → Sent). The Lapse Prevention Engine scores every donor for lapse risk and surfaces them on a radar chart with At Risk / Critical cohorts. Mizan ships live AI operations infrastructure, not just dashboards.

Compound sadaqah + named Jariyah Vaults. One dollar can cycle through qard hassan helping multiple families before landing at a final cause — every cycle tracked. And every position can be tagged to a perpetual Jariyah Vault in a deceased loved one's name, with memorial-grade impact updates.

Mathematical models

Mizan is powered by a quantitative engine that translates Islamic finance primitives into tracked, compoundable numbers.

Formula 1: Akhirah Portfolio Value (APV)

The headline number on the Personal Portfolio dashboard is the aggregate impact-weighted value of all active and perpetual positions:

APV = Σ P_i × M_i × Φ(c_i, r_i)

Where P_i is principal committed to position i, M_i is the compound multiplier (cycles completed + projected), and Φ(c_i, r_i) is the cause-by-region impact coefficient sourced from NGO cost-per-outcome tables.

Formula 2: Compound Cycle Multiplier

For Compound-mode positions, the cycle multiplier draws from Surah Al-Baqarah 2:261 — the parable of the grain producing seven ears, each with a hundred grains:

M(n) = Σ_{k=1}^{n}  ρ_k × (1 − δ_k)^k

Where n is cycle count (1–10, or ∞ for Sadaqah Jaariyah), ρ_k is the per-cycle recycling factor (Micro 0.92, Standard 0.88, Major 0.83), and δ_k is the default-to-sadaqah probability. For Jariyah positions (n → ∞), the series converges to M_∞ = ρ / (1 − ρ(1 − δ)) — the perpetuity value rendered in the vault view.

Algorithmic Analysis

Pool disbursement — deciding which subset of applicants to fund given finite capital and tier-share constraints — is a constrained 0-1 integer program equivalent to a weighted multi-dimensional knapsack. Classical solve is O(2ᴺ) in the worst case. We formulate it as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO), mapping directly to the Ising model and suitable for annealing (D-Wave).

Architecture

Mizan follows a layered architecture designed for trust and real-time responsiveness.

External Data Layer. IRS 501(c)(3) records, Mapbox geospatial tiles, Claude API, NGO cost-per-outcome tables, and payment rails (Stripe / Dwolla).

Backend Intelligence Layer. Our JavaScript service handles loan parsing, feasibility gating, QUBO-based pool allocation, cycle settlement, lapse-risk scoring, portfolio value aggregation, and Claude-driven AI operations.

Frontend Experience Layer. Four differentiated account dashboards, the 3D Mapbox impact globe, welfare-case kanban, the AI automation operations center, and Jariyah Vault memorial pages.

The architecture is modular so each Islamic-finance primitive — zakat, waqf, qard hassan, jariyah — can evolve independently, and separate holidays like Eid Al-Fitr and Eid Al-Adha are streamed in.

Key Design Principles

1. Portfolio-grade, not donation-grade. Every number is computed with 401(k)-level rigor — derived, auditable, tied to real outcomes.

2. The mosque is infrastructure. Masjids are operating institutions with balance sheets and triage queues, not logos on a splash page.

3. Forgiveness is a feature. Default in qard hassan is a circle-voted conversion with 3 real-time agents to discuss sadaqah that credits every lender's portfolio — nobody is punished for hardship or adversity.

4. Action over analytics. Every dashboard ends in a specific verb — acknowledge, vouch, resolve, intervene — not a chart to admire.

Why us

Most Islamic giving tools are single-purpose donation pages, informal mosque spreadsheets, or AI chatbots with no operational grounding. Mizan combines all three into one workflow: portfolio-grade position tracking, quantitative qard hassan mechanics, and a live AI operations layer.

We don't just show where giving happens — we show where it compounds, where it settles, and who it reaches.

Challenges we ran into

modeling perpetuity in a system of finite capital (the ∞ cycle case)
designing a forgiveness path that rewards lenders without creating moral hazard
formulating pool allocation as a QUBO Hamiltonian that actually respects tier-share constraints
drafting Claude outputs with memorial sensitivity for named jariyah vaults
building four complete account experiences and a full AI Automation Engine with multiple gears under hackathon time pressure

Accomplishments that we're proud of

shipped four differentiated account experiences with a shared ledger
rendered a live 3D Mapbox impact globe tracking sadaqah geographically with QuickBooks and Stripe integration
shipped Acknowledgment and Lapse Prevention engines as working AI operations tools
built the Jariyah Vault as a memorial-grade perpetual-sadaqah feature

What we learned

AI is strongest when paired with structured Islamic-finance logic, not used as a chat layer
religious principles are product specifications, not constraints
the most compelling products go from insight to action — acknowledge, vouch, resolve, intervene
knapsack-style allocation problems map cleanly to quantum-ready formulations

Business Impact

The global Islamic finance market exceeds $4 trillion, yet two billion Muslims have almost no aligned digital infrastructure for the form of wealth their faith explicitly commands them to build. Mosques run informal lending circles on WhatsApp. Families track jariyah on paper. NGOs fundraise with Mailchimp.

Mizan reframes the space as portfolio-grade infrastructure — valuable for individual donors, families building named jariyah vaults, masjids formalizing welfare and zakat operations, Muslim NGOs running live donor operations, and Islamic funds seeking compliant community-capital flows.

Built With

Frontend: JavaScript, Mapbox GL (3D Impact Globe), 21st.Dev
AI: Claude API, Gemini (acknowledgment, parsing, matching, narrative, reports)
Data Layer: IRS 501(c)(3) records, NGO cost-per-outcome tables, poverty-threshold datasets
Payments: Stripe / QuickBooks

What's next for Mizan

adding zakat as a native account type with automated annual calculation
launching waqf (endowment) accounts for multi-generational, irrevocable giving
building mosque federation so circles can lend across affiliated masjids
shipping shareable Jariyah tribute pages for named vaults

Why Mizan

Mizan is not another donation app. It is a portfolio-grade system for Islamic giving — combining quantitative qard hassan mechanics, a 3D geospatial impact globe, and a live AI operations layer into a single workflow.

It helps Muslims see their Akhirah Portfolio clearly, move capital with intention, and prepare for the only account that truly clears.

Built at hack.msa · 2026