The insurance machine at large leaves much to be automated. The claim process still takes days, or even weeks, but can actually be boiled down to just a few clicks. André Wolke and Sebastian Bürgel of Validity Labs shared their experience in building a smart contract-driven solution for car insurance at their workshop during #D1Conf.

First thing, André outlined the challenges developers face when working with emerging technologies — e.g., insufficient maturity of software, the steepness of the learning curve, exposure to hack attacks, etc. He highlighted the importance of sticking to the existing best practices throughout the whole development life cycle to tackle these challenges.

André Wolke and Sebastian Bürgel of Validity Labs at #D1Conf

“Security is a big issue, still. This all goes in very critical areas of best practices for security. There are lots of discussions around, specifically, the younger generation in software development, they have views of how we actually write programs, but there have been best practices for many, many years, so they are here for the reason.”

— André Wolke, Validity Labs

Moving to practical part, Sebastian demoed a sample car insurance app built as smart contract on blockchain, as well as explained the choice behind the toolchain underlying the solution. You can find the source code in the project’s GitHub.

Sebastian Bürgel and André Wolke of Validity Labs at #D1Conf

“We, kind of, have an open architecture (on blockchain), which is general enough to be used for pretty much anything. This has nothing to do with car insurance anymore, which is again attractive to build a showcase, but it’s very easy to transfer this showcase to something else. So, go ahead and make it for baggage or travel insurance.That’s the beauty of the space, it’s not just about the technical things, it’s also about the ideological changes.”

— Sebastian Bürgel, Validity Labs

For more details watch the full video.

You can also check out the slides by André and Sebastian.