After a successful first year, we are excited to announce new blockchain and insurance partners that will help Etherisc grow as a company. We also remain committed to working with the community, which is why we’ll be launching a token sale later this year.

By getting involved in the token sale, you’ll support the development of DIP — the Decentralized Insurance Platform, a free and open platform for decentralized insurance applications. To showcase the power of decentralized insurance applications, we’ll start selling our own insurance product, Etherisc Flight Delay, commercially in the US and the EU. We intend to do so by becoming the first authorized insurance company on the blockchain.

Two new important partnerships for Etherisc

First, we are excited to announce a partnership with Lakeside Partners and inacta AG. Lakeside Partners are among the key players developing the Cryptovalley ecosystem in Zug, Switzerland, and inacta AG is a major service provider for the Swiss insurance industry. Both companies are also the initiators of the $100k Blockchain competition for blockchain insurance applications. We feel honored and proud to be working with them and happy to be adding Ralf Glabischnig, one of the Lakeside Partners and founder of inacta AG, to our board of advisors.

Second, we will work with Cofound.it to launch a token generating event later this year. When we first met Jan and Daniel from Cofound.it back in March 2017, we were immediately convinced that these guys were the real deal. They have a proven track record and a ton of experience with token sales and token economics. They’ve also done great work establishing communities for the projects they’ve nurtured. All of these factors made them our first choice to help us develop our token sale plans. We feel honored to work with them, too.

DIP: a decentralized platform for insurance applications

We have put together a great team to work on DIP, the Decentralized Insurance Platform. The first key component of this platform will be a free, open and standard protocol for decentralized insurance applications. Christoph is leading the development of the protocol, and we are looking for partners and individuals to work with us. Please reach out to [email protected] if you are interested in doing so.

No platform is worth its salt if it does not come with concrete applications and products on top of it. Our next big milestone is to sell insurance policies to real customers with the core business processes implemented in smart contracts and using the Decentralized Insurance Platform on Ethereum. The goal is to demonstrate that DIP can be used to sell commercial, licensed and fully regulated insurance products.

Etherisc: becoming the first authorized insurance company on the blockchain

We strongly believe that regulatory safety is another key component for a decentralized insurance platform, and we are working with regulators in different jurisdictions and insurance partners in the major markets to roll out commercial products.

At Etherisc we aim to be regulated from day 1. That is, we plan to only sell licensed insurance products. Acquiring proper authorizations in every market where we will be selling insurance is critical, and we expect to be authorized as an insurance company in one of our target markets sometime between Q4 2017 and Q2 2018.

Obtaining authorization to underwrite insurance is a collaborative process involving multiple partners and specialized service providers. Earlier this year, we initiated an evaluation of insurance management companies to support our application for authorization. In July 2017, the team selected a service provider in the EU and began the process of authorization.

Etherisc Flight Delay: the first commercial, licensed, and fully regulated product built on DIP

As a startup with limited resources, we understand the importance of focus. Despite ambitions to operate a multi-line specialty insurance carrier business in the Property & Casualty category, we are now laser-focused on getting an insurance underwriter license and commence sales of a single line of product, Etherisc Flight Delay.

Etherisc Flight Delay will target both Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B) markets. For the B2C market the product will cover unplanned travel expenses; in the B2B segment, our product will cover losses of revenue, reputation, and profits of business customers.

Compared to traditional competition in this area, Etherisc Flight Delay will offer real-time pricing of policies and instant and fully automated claims as well as payouts. On the back-end of insurance operations, Etherisc aims to operate in a fully transparent manner, with real-time visibility into insurance premiums collected, premiums earned, claims made, available funds, and underwriting profits.

Our go-to-market strategy focuses on launching sales in the US and select countries in the EU in late 2017 or early 2018. Distribution channels include Travel Management Companies through integration with three major Global Distribution Systems and Online Travel Operators.

Renat has the lead on developing commercial products, and we are looking for partners (reinsurance, fronting, risk modelers, MGAs) and individuals (actuaries, data scientists) to work with us. Please reach out to [email protected] if you are interested in discussing this.

Up next: the DIP token sale

We hope you now have a clearer picture of where we’re heading in the upcoming weeks and months. Keep following us because in our next post we’ll be touching on the token sale which has garnered quite a lot of attention and, consequently, questions.