Etherisc Celebrates Its First Anniversary

The journey so far

Etherisc has been working on a decentralized insurance platform for a year now. Challenging an established multi-trillion industry with cutting-edge technology is never easy, but our prototypes have already shown great promise. Our mission is to build a blockchain platform that makes buying and selling insurance more efficient, lowers operational costs, provides greater transparency, and democratizes access to reinsurance investments.

Before we reveal what’s next for Etherisc, we wanted to take a moment to review our biggest milestones and thank everyone who helped us along the way.

Renat, Christoph and Stephan at Etherisc Headquarters in Icking, Germany.

Etherisc: from a Slack discussion to first prototype in less than 2 months

It all started when Christoph and Stephan met on the 2030 Slack in July 2016. We were discussing a post on insurance on the blockchain written by David Siegel for the ConsenSys blog, and soon came up with our own version of a blockchain insurance application.

In September 2016, we demonstrated the Flight Delay Dapp in production on the Ethereum mainnet at Devcon2 in Shanghai. We also applied the same model of parametric insurance to crop insurance based on weather data. Our approach proved that smart contracts can reduce operational costs to a level which enables new markets, bringing the benefits of insurance to millions of farmers in developing countries.

Building our community and getting initial funding

In November 2016, we joined hack.ether.camp, a virtual hackathon, to develop a decentralized market for insurance and reinsurance. We developed a method of using tokens to transfer and trade risks easily, bringing the concept of insurance linked securities to the blockchain. We finished the hackathon as the most funded project, receiving more than 500,000 Hackergold and about 3,000 Ether from early supporters.

The event also attracted new team members and was the beginning of our amazing community. Thank you all for your tireless support and contributions. Make sure to hold on to the RSC tokens!

At the same time, Etherisc was also awarded as winner in the Blockchain startup contest, sharing the main prize with Status.

In January 2017, we demonstrated a prototype for social insurance on the blockchain as our submission for the Blockchain Virtual GovHack in UAE.

A month later, we closed a small “friends and family” seed funding round with trusted friends and colleagues which gave us the necessary runway to continue our development. Thank you for your great support!

In April 2017, Etherisc won the Blockchain Oscar for “Most Innovative Blockchain Startup”. Other Blockchain Oscar winners were SolarChange, Status (again) and Bancor. We also started working with EY to explore the regulatory and legal aspects of setting up and operating an insurance company on blockchain.

In June 2017, Etherisc joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and started the Insurance Working Group there, which Stephan and Christoph are chairing now.

What’s next for Etherisc?

All of this brings us to now. After a year of successful prototypes and partnerships, we are now ready to fully demonstrate the benefits of insurance applications on a public blockchain for both customers and users. With new partnerships and an upcoming Decentralized Insurance Platform that enables a wide range of insurance applications on the Ethereum blockchain, we have an exciting year ahead of us! You can read more about what’s next for Etherisc in the next blog post.