Etherisc (DIP)

Basics

• Started in: July 2016
• Based in:
• DeFi insurance, on ethereum
• Decentralized Insurance Protocol (DIP) comes from Etherisc
• Is building decentralized insurance applications, making the purchase and sale of insurance more efficient, enable lower operational costs, provide greater transparency into the industry of insurance compared to traditional operations, and democratize access to reinsurance investments.

Token

Token allocation

• From (20-7-2018) a (overwhelmingly positive, bordering shilling, review by FlatOutCrypto):

"DIP will have a total supply of 1Bn, which was to be allocated:

1. Public about 50m
2. Founders 100m
3. Team/early supporters 150m (The early supporters contributed back in late 2016, at which point the team raised c. 3,000 ETH and 530,000 HackerGold in exchange for RSC tokens. These RSC tokens can now be converted to DIP (the Etherisc token).
4. Foundation about 700m
5. Lockup periods are fairly large (by crypto standards) for the most part:
6. Public 50m (60% of these are locked up for 12 months — at token sale you were afforded option of locking tokens up for 12 months in order to gain a 25% bonus)
7. Founders 100m (24 month lockup)
8. Team/early supporters 150m (all of the team tokens are locked for 12 months; early supporters have the option to lock up or not)
9. Foundation 700m (not locked for a duration, but “are legally tied to the foundation’s purpose”) — I think it is doubtful these will be sold off quickly as it doesn’t make sense and from what I gather Swiss foundations are rather tightly regulated"

Utility

• Decentralized Insurance Protocol (DIP) comes from Etherisc.
• Insurers/participants (not the customer) wishing to use the system must stake DIP.
• From their FAQ (15-1-2021):

"DIP Tokens act as the native internal currency that is inseparable from the protocol and network of its users. DIP tokens are needed to earn transaction fees (% of insurance premiums or fixed cost), incentivize and reward platform users to bring risk to the network, build and maintain risk transfer products. DIP tokens give users access to the Decentralized Insurance Platform. By staking DIP token, participants provide collateral (bond) to guarantee future performance, availability, and service levels. Staking also signals quality and reputation. As a result, participants can earn money monetizing their skills, software (for example risk models or UI/UX), risk capital, insurance licenses, claim processing, or regulatory compliance/reporting services."

Tech

• Whitepaper can be found here (1-11-2017)
• Code can be viewed here.
• Built on: Ethereum

Layer Two

• Is thinking of using xDai for staking (11-11-2020).

Privacy Method being used

Compliance

• From their FAQ (15-1-2021):

"With insurance, we are entering a highly regulated business area, and we want to make very sure that we fully comply with the Swiss FINMA ICO guidelines and in particular with Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) requirements.

We use the following service providers: IDnow GmbH in Germany to identify individual contributors, Swiss-based KYC Spider AG, to check compliance with AML regulations, and Bity.com to identify legal entities and individuals worldwide. There is a country selection at the first page of the registration process. The selected country will define the identification service provider to be used in the following process. If your country is supported by IDnow, you will be redirected to IDnow’s online identification service. If your country is not supported, you will get instructions to register with Bity.com and use their identification service.

During the online identification with IDnow, you will show identification documents to a human agent and verify their authenticity in a video call. The call should take you about 3 minutes. You will receive an email notification as soon as the identification process and all checks are successfully passed.

Please note that only Ethereum addresses from contributors who successfully pass KYC and AML will be whitelisted, and only ETH transactions from whitelisted addresses will be accepted in the TGE."

Oracle Method being used

• Is using Chainlink for multiple insurance projects (23-11-2020).
• For their Flying Insurance they say (22-9-2020) they "are happy to collaborate with three of the best-known oracle providers — Oraclize (now rebranded to Provable), ChainLink and Band Protocol to bring you the best experience and truly decentralized control on your protection contracts!"

Their Projects

• From (20-7-2018) a (overwhelmingly positive, bordering shilling, review by FlatOutCrypto):

"The company has produced two products and has a further 20+ in production either internally or by community members."

Flight Delay 

The first product is Flight Delay which, as the name suggests, is an insurance product which automatically pays out if your flight is delayed by a certain amount of time. Etherisc sold 100 policies to cover insurance to Devcon 3 in 2017. Flight delays are a really easy fit for blockchain because they are easily measured (there is public information about flight times which an oracle (an agent which sources information and then submits that to be used by the smart contract) can take the data from and then a simple calculation will determine if a user should be paid or not depending on the delay suffered. If over 2 hours — the appropriate payout will be made to the customer.

Hurricane Insurance

The second product, Hurricane Insurance, is arguably more interesting because it demonstrates the potential of Etherisc as an application. The brainchild of two developers not part of the core Etherisc team, Joel Martinez and Jonathan Gonzalez, this product aims to cater to the needs of people in Puerto Rico following the 2017 Hurricane Maria - the worst natural disaster in the country’s history. Despite the loss of life and damages incurred, insurance payouts have been slow (or not yet realised), leaving citizens stranded, unable to repair their homes or shops. Their proposed insurance policy was to create a parametric insurance policy which would automatically pay out to customers within three days should a major hurricane hit the island (determined by public weather data). While the payout is limited (up to $9,000), it would provide a lifeline to people in the immediate wake of the disaster.

• “We want to provide a wallet that is insurable, so if you lose the assets because of a software bug, attack, or some systemic failure, then you are eligible for a refund."

• Their FAQ mentions the above ones and (15-1-2021):

1. "Crypto-backed lender insurance. Watch for the announcement from market leading crypto-backed lenders on the 2nd week of June!
2. DAO/smart contract insurance is in design/prototyping."

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Audits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Usage

• As of 19-12-2019 according to Etherscan:

Holders: 460 addresses

Transfers: 1,211

Competition

• Nexus Mutual, Opyn and VouchForMe
• More info here (5-5-2020)

Team, investors, Partnerships, etc.

Team

• Full team can be viewed here (15-1-2021).
• Karpischek, Stephan; Co-founder & CEO “Stephan is digital strategist at disrupt consulting and has more than 20 years experience in IT businesses. He advises finance and telecom enterprises on digital strategy. In 2015 he was part of the of the UBS crypto 2.0 innovation lab at Level39 in London. Stephan has been working on digital currencies since 2008 and likes to play with blockchains.”
• Mussenbrock, Christoph; Co-founder & CEO. “After several years on the board of a cooperative bank, he switched to the IT segment and became Chief Program Manager Credit Solutions and Chief of Strategy Development at Fiducia & GAD IT AG – one of Germany’s biggest IT Service Providers. Since 2015, he has been CEO of parcIT GmbH, one of Germany’s best-known companies specialized in risk management solutions. Due to his many years of working in the field of banking and insurance, Christoph is highly experienced in all matters concerning regulatory frameworks. He also co-founded Progeno Wohnungsgenossenschaft eG, a housing cooperative in Munich, which has successfully crowdfunded a large residential project in Munich. Christoph has a master’s degree in mathematics and wrote his thesis on formal soft- and hardware verification.“
• Khasanshyn, Renat; co-founder “Renat is founder & CEO of Altoros, and Venture Partner at Runa Capital. Renat helps define Altoros’s strategic vision, and its role in Cloud Foundry PaaS ecosystem. In the past, Renat has been selected as finalist for the Emerging Executive of the Year award by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council and once won an IBM Business Mashup Challenge. Prior to founding Altoros, Renat was VP of Engineering for Tampa-based insurance company PriMed. Renat is also founder of Apatar, an open source data integration toolset, founder of Silicon Valley NewSQL User Group and co-founder of the Belarusian Java User Group. He studied Engineering at Belarusian National Technical University.”
• Bernstein, Ron; advisor (as of 9-2019 still on the website)
• Jake Brukhman; advisor (as of 9-2019 on the website)
• Aya Miyaguchi; advisor
• Virgil Griffith; advisor

Investors

• Since their ICO did not make it to the planned 10M one concern might be funding. From (20-7-2018) the review by FlatOutCrypto):

"The public sale will net c. $4–5m. Their slide deck for contributors didn’t cover a scenario where they raised under $10m. The team’s response to this, and I make no real judgement either way, was as follows:

“First, Etherisc has been operating for more than two years now. So in contrast to many other ICOs, we are not starting from scratch and have a working product, and more to follow. Of course the funds planning needs to be adjusted to the actual raise. Note that we are already operating an insurance business with our partner Atlas, and definitely fulfilling solvency II requirements there.”"

Partners

• Etherisc founded and chair the Insurance Working Group for the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
• Partnered with EY and MME
• Generali Switzerland announced a partnership with Etherisc to develop an ‘innovative retail value proposition’.