Tuesday, October 19th, 2022
đź“Ł Dear Etherisc Community,
🚀 Welcome to the Weekly Update!
Hello, hello đź‘‹
🔹 SmartCon22
🔹 DevCon in Bogota
The Chainlink SmartCon 2022 in New York City 🇺🇸 is already a few weeks over. Unfortunately, we still have no video upload, but Chainlink is working on it, and we expect it to be published in the next few days. While we´re waiting, here are a few excerpts from Christoph’s presentation @SmartCon:
Decentralized Insurance — Where we are, where to go
Where are we?
As 2022 draws to a close, what have we been able to check off?
The audits, the Generic Insurance Framework 2.0, Staking and LCCC.
The Inclusive team around Hui Lin, Michiel and Jan represented Etherisc at various congresses and events in many countries around the world, be it to introduce the benefits of GIF to the traditional insurance industry or to bring crypto and blockchain natives on board to build the future of decentralized protection with us, to build ON US.
Where to go?
Three topics will continue to keep us on our toes in 2023:
Governance | Scaling | Economic Model
Christoph will highlight each segment in detail in his SmartCon presentation. Here in the Weekly Update, a quick overview:
Scaling: Transactional and Infrastructure:
- Transactional
Policies and shares of risk pools will be tradeable
as tokens and redeemable in case of claims
gasless transactions will reduce gas costs by up
to 90% and therefore enable 10x higher throughput. - Infrastructure
GIF is already multi-chain enabled
We are working on “1-click-install” to enable
interested parties to launch new GIF Instances
in a fast and safe way.
Scaling: Economical and Ecosystem:
- Ecosystem
Audited and configurable product templates will
enable onboarding of new teams in no time. - Economical
Risk pools which are backed by reinsurance pools
and which need not be fully collateralized
will enable higher capital efficiency.
High-Level Governance:
The experience of the last years has already shown a demand for a multitude of independent deployments of the GIF on different chains. We have already deployed on Ethereum Mainnet, xDai/Gnosis, Avalance, and Celo, to name the most important, and on different testnets like Goerli, Kovan, Polygon and Binance. These instances will be run by different entities: either by the Etherisc team itself or by other independent parties who are interested in the job.
To maintain trust and uniform quality throughout the ecosystem, we intend to certify each GIF instance asking for it. The certification can refer to the technology but also other properties, and applicants can achieve different “levels” or “badges”. Every party who applies for a certificate will have to stake DIP tokens in a global staking pool. In return, these parties will receive governance and voting rights and have a say in the platform's further development. This structure will be implemented as a DAO. The swiss “Decentralized Insurance Foundation” will act as a legal body but will not exert any decisive force.
This governance layer will also serve as an optional arbitration facility to resolve disputes between customers and product owners.
Economics Level 1: GIF Instance:
The sole source of revenue is the premiums paid by the insured. Part of the gross premium is used to pay for the different services needed to run the product, from product design, oracles, license fees and distribution.
Another part is deducted as a fee to pay for the operational cost of the GIF instance. The remainder, the net premium, is collected in the risk pool. Depending on the loss events, a smaller or larger part is used to adjust claims. The rest is distributed between the investors as a reward for allocating/staking risk capital.
All revenue-earning parties in the system are required to stake a certain amount of DIP tokens, depending on the business volume.
Economic Level 2: Ecosystem:
On a higher level, the global ecosystem also needs to be funded. Therefore, each GIF instance asking for participation in the governance process (including certification, voting rights and arbitration) will deduct a small amount as a fee to the global staking pool and DAO. The collected fees will be used to further develop the platform and framework.
A more detailed breakdown of economics and governance will be published in the upcoming release of the Whitepaper 2.0.
DevCon, Bogotá, Colombia 2022
The Developers Conference in Bogotá 🇨🇴 was a meetup extraordinaire:
Nearly 6,000 visitors from around the world gathered at the Agora Convention Center to follow the call of the Ethereum Foundation.
We recorded a “ask me anything” with Christoph on Friday, the event's last day. The video of the DevCon AMA can be found here.
Christoph and Sebastian are talking about the event and the venue itself, why “onboarding the next billion” is on everybody´s mind, and the spirit of many blockchain events lately. The next billion users that will use
crypto- and blockchain technologies will most likely stem from the African, Indian and Asian continents.
Although Christoph didn’t speak this time and could therefore mingle in a relaxed way, the Awareness of Etherisc was noticeable. “It is still the case that real-world applications are very sparse,” says Christoph, “Etherisc is one of the very few projects that are already well positioned. You could compare the status quo in blockchain to an imaginary world where you have full-featured nuclear physics but no simple applications yet, such as a bicycle, that exist on these laws of physics and are ready to use.”
A project in India, also part of the Ethereum fellowship program and running on the ETH blockchain, is an application that grants & manages micro-loans. This could be a textbook case to showcase the reciprocal benefit of microloans granted and being insured in an automated & decentralized way.
Carbon credits were again a huge topic; the wide range of possibilities to use, trade, insure and benefit from carbon credits makes them so attractive for so many use cases. Blockchain technology will revolutionize the individual use of carbon credits and offset carbon. At least, that’s what is believed to happen.
Acre Africa and the Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition are our partners on the African continent that insure the crops of as many farmers as possible against catastrophic climate events. The AMA explains the procedure for onboarding farmers using the example of the LCCC in Kenya and maps out how everybody in the coalition played their part in making this project run.
In this second bracket of the interview, we also touch on the topics of scalability and layer 2 solutions, as well as our future deployment to Polygon ZK-EVM. Gas fees will be minimized through this.
In the third and final bracket of the AMA, Christoph talks about a much-anticipated topic: Risk pools and staking. After waiting for so long, we can finally announce that the first risk pool is live, backing the LCCC project in Kenya. The Lemonade Foundation stakes stablecoins in this risk pool and is, therefore, the very first party to do so!
This risk pool will not be alone for long, others will follow.
After finishing the audits and with two large applications running in Kenya, it is now the time to look into crypto risks. We are currently developing a de-peg insurance, including risk pools open to the public — finally implementing one of the last missing cornerstones of the Etherisc ecosystem, the core utility of the DIP token!
Last but not least, Christoph gives a short outlook on 2023, Q1&Q2.
Due to technical difficulties, we have two parts uploaded on our YouTube channel, and the AMA was not recorded in its entirety. Please excuse this. More AMAs are soon to come.
If you have questions for Christoph´s next AMA, send them to: sebastian@etherisc.com, or post them on one of our Social Media channels!
That’s it for this week; feedback always makes us happy!
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