Hi travelers, Dean (
In a Nutshell.
Etherisc is a decentralized Ethereum dAPP which offers smart-contract powered insurance products.
The project is being developed out of Germany by a team of veteran developers, bankers and insurance specialists. You can learn about how it came together here.
Etherisc aims at reinventing and democratizing insurance through the power of blockchain and smart contracts. Being decentralized indeed brings considerable benefits to an insurance product, notably:
- EFFICIENCY AND AUTOMATION
Smart contract technology enables end-to-end automation of payments, efficient risk model estimation, and semi-automated claims processing, thus substantially lowering operating costs.
- ACCESS FOR INSURANCE CUSTOMERS
Lower costs enable insurance solutions for developing markets, low-income businesses, and new product verticals which have been previously unable to obtain insurance. For example, crop insurance for rural farmers in developing countries is an underserved market and a good candidate for further exploration.
- ACCESS FOR INSURANCE INVESTORS
Digital assets on blockchains create opportunities to structure exposure to insurance products for a much broader range of investors.
- TRANSPARENCY
On most blockchains, transparency is a platform-level feature. All data in a smart contract based system is publicly auditable and can be freely analyzed by third parties.
The Etherisc platform currently offers three such products: Social Insurance, Crop Insurance and Flight Delay Insurance.
So today we'd like to give you a primer on one of these products: the Flight Delay dAPP.
The Flight Delay Dapp.
The Flight Delay Dapp (FDD) is ETHERISC's first commercial product and also:
the first decentralized insurance application which can issue policies and pay out valid claims completely autonomously.
As its name suggests, the FDD can be used to automatically insure your flights in a totally decentralized way via smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum Network.
A disclaimer though. Right now the project is still at the stage of being a demo running on the Ropsten test-net so the following walkthrough might be subject to changes when the project finally migrate to the mainnet. However this guide will allow you to familiarize yourself with the dAPP and experience first-hand the power of smart contracts.
So let's jump right into this.
How it works.
- First you'll need to install Metamask which is conveniently available at the Chrome WebStore.
- Once Metamask is installed, you can head over to the FDD page. There, open Metamask and select the Ropsten Test-net.
- Enter your personal and flight details and click Apply.
- You then need to choose your premium (expressed in ether). Interestingly, the dAPP let you adjust the amount of Ether you decide to stake so we recommend you play around with that until you find the best risk/reward ratio. In this respect, the FDD is very much similar to a betting platform or a prediction market.
- Finally, confirm the transaction in Metamask and click Submit, your transaction will then be mined.
- After it is finished mining you'll receive an email of confirmation with your policy attached.
And that's it, you're now good to go on your adventure.
The platform relies on Oracles to determine if flights are on time or not and if yours happen to be delayed/cancelled you will then be automatically refunded ETH to your ETH address. It's pretty neat.
So that's it for today guys, if you'd like to know more about the project, you can head over to their website, join their Telegram Channel and read their whitepaper.
We hope you've learned something new and don't forget to re-steem, upvote and follow
Cheers,
Dan & Dean.