With a lot of talk around combining the forces of insurance and blockchain, the scenarios brought into real life are still only a few. At #D1Conf, Makoto Inoue of Simply Business shared the experience of his company — a major business insurance broker in UK — hosting the #BreakTheBlock hackathon to explore the potential of blockchain in the context of insurance.

Makoto provided some insights into the results of the hackathon, analyzed the winner project, and tried to outline some emerging trends in building blockchain-powered solutions for insurance.

“You try to put some insurance aspect into blockchain, and see what happens. This may not work. The majority of hackers (at the #BreakTheBlock hackathon) tried to put insurance logic into blockchain, and ask an insurer to use it, because blockchain is transformable.”

— Makoto Inoue, Simply Business

Discussing the winner case — which represented a solution for insuring a festival, Makoto tried to identify the recipe that made the jury choose it. In his view, that could be a mix of protection against unexpected financial loss, sharable interests, and a bit of IoT and mobile technologies together with blockchain. All the projects developed at the #BreakTheBlock hackathon can be found in this GitHub repo and are subject for open feedback.

For more details, watch the video from the conference.

You can also check out Makoto’s slides.