The InsureDAO journey
We have launched “InsureDAO” on Testnet. Let me take this opportunity to explain how we developed the Defi Insurance protocol over the last 6 months and how we came to meet our strong partners. We want to share our journey with our InsureDAO community members!
A nearly broke crypto believer.
I was a crypto lover with nearly no money when I started InsureDAO.
When I left my last full-time job, I hadn’t decided on anything, in particular, to do in the future.- But, there was one thing that’s certain in my heart: “Crypto is the future.”
Although I believe Crypto offers more than just trading, at that time, it was in its winter, and there weren’t many active users. Since then, I have struggled and developed many Dapps like a new NFT standard called ERC2615 and a prediction market called Forecastory, but I never reached the product I feel satisfied with. And even with “Forecastory,” I wasn’t sure whether I should hit the accelerator because the user’s reactions were insignificant. The number of users who made “predictions” was significantly low.
In Autumn 2020, Onchain activities were growing rapidly. Crypto finally became not only for trading. Meanwhile, a growing number of projects got hacked, and many people lost their funds.
I wondered if it is too difficult to make “predictions” when the genre of prediction has not been narrowed down. I asked myself, “why wouldn’t I tune Forecastory into hacking events?” “By this way, wouldn’t I be able to use the power of prediction?”. Fortunately, a market-driven and open insurance protocol didn’t exist then, and I thought “DeFi could unleash its power if there were an open insurance protocol in the ecosystem.”
At this moment, InsureDAO was born.
I was almost bankrupt, but I decided to take one last “bet” with InsureDAO.
Meeting the teammates
Straight away, I called my DeFi friends and told them about the pivot plan from “Forecastory” to “InsureDAO.”
All were excited about the idea. Each of them contributed their own ideas to InsureDAO, saying:
“We also want to be able to purchase insurance for small and medium-sized protocols”
“Even if the insurance is for a popular protocol, we want to make sure that the system does not sell out”
“When underwriting insurance, we want to receive a return that reflects the amount of risk at the time”
Through these discussions, we concluded that we want to make “InsureDAO a platform where anyone can buy and sell at any time and any risk.”
After all, the members in the discussion, Rubio, Shun, Motoki, Hirory, and I, became a team.
Teaming up was miraculous. Rubio, a Biz, and Shun, an engineer, had just lost their job because the NFT Marketplace had ended and were about to start their next career outside Crypto. After they decided to join, we started developing InsureDAO from morning to night at a McDonald’s in Tokyo Station, our first office.
Encountering Daisuke Iwase, an Insurance expert
While we all knew deeply about Crypto, we lacked the domain knowledge of insurance. We want to make InsureDAO where people can easily trade risks and premiums like Lloyd’s in London, but we didn’t know how Lloyd’s works.
We concluded that to build an insurance market, we need a professional.
As we asked our friends to introduce us to insurance experts, we had an opportunity to meet with Daisuke Iwase, the founder of one of Japan’s leading online insurance companies named Lifenet Insurance Company and former CDO at AIA group.
In the meeting, Daisuke told us that he had started a startup that operates an NFT marketplace and Dapps he has been interested in recently. He is familiar with both insurance and blockchain technology. At that moment, I was 100% certain he was the person I had been looking for. Later, I convinced him, and he agreed to join InsureDAO as the chairman. We agreed to make InsureDAO a top-tier insurance service.
Getting propelled by fundraising
After teaming up with a strong team of members and coding an MVP product, we began seed round fundraising.
In May 2021, when Coinbase went public, we successfully closed our fundraising with the help of market trends. Since this was my first fundraising, I was nervous if I could do it right.
After all, we received more than $2M offers and got oversubscribed, exceeding our original plan of $1M.
We made our first public appearance on June 26, 2021, with the release of our fundraising, and we heard the excitement from the crypto community.
Pursue the same goal with Richard, the CEO of Quantstamp
Throughout the fundraising process, we had one more fateful encounter. We met Richard, the Founder/CEO of the world’s largest code auditing company.
When we had the opportunity to pitch to Richard through a request for a code audit, we passionately explained that it would become the responsibility of the Defi operator to provide their protocol insurance for their users and their Code Audit.
Richard’s response was, “I’m very impressed. Are you open to investment?”
We said, “We’re in the middle of the seed round. So let’s work together. And, if we are going to do this, we would like you to be a First Reporting Member.”
Since our service has a built-in oracle module consisting of an indirect democracy in which Reporting members selected by INSURE Token holders make decisions on insurance payments, it is essential to gather Reporting members who the crypto community can trust.
While a code audit company and an insurance protocol offer different solutions, we are aiming for the same goal: the safer crypto ecosystem. I’m excited about what we can do together for the crypto community.
Join us our Testnet and continue our journey
Finally, InsureDAO is out on Rinkeby testnet. In testnet, we have prepared Missions Bingo for you. This testnet lets you experience a part of the core functionalities of InsureDAO, and this is an excellent opportunity for you to be an InsureDAO community member.
I hope you enjoy it, and let us know if you find something unintuitive or difficult when using InsureDAO! Your feedback will incorporate into our mainnet
https://medium.com/p/c5e62c2915f1
PS: If you haven’t yet, come and join our active community on Discord:
Join the InsureDAO Discord Server!
