Today we are talking with Jan Stockhausen, chief legal architect of Etherisc, a decentralized insurance protocol with products to protect a variety of assets anywhere from crops to crypto wallets. Users of Etherisc also have the capability to request or build an insurance product of their own.

Ideas of governance, insurance, financial services compliance started coming up around 2016, where we realized that this concept of programmable distributed systems was real and could be brought to life with Ethereum.

In the DeFi space, there is the ability to lend, to borrow, to earn you governance tokens, utility tokens, to really be a participant in the network. I think we've now started to see the next evolution where people actually want to work in the network. They want to participate in voting or proposals or governance. These worlds combining start making a really nice hub for what will be the needs of insurance.

All these people, the insured, insurance companies, and regulators, need to trust each other. Insurance is very centralized, very highly regulated and therefore also fairly slow industry and slow moving. If you take blockchain technology and the trustless network it offers, you see the possibilities. You can put all these actors together, rather than having a centralized insurance entity in the middle.

With the help of the regulation that provides the certainty that everyone will get what they signed up for and the blockchain can solve the problem in a decentralized and a much more efficient way.

We are at the stage where there are many applications that are crypto native, and a lot of the financial instruments that are emerging in the DeFi space.

We're also working on insurance for crypto wallets, for example. It's fair to say we're spearheading this breakthrough of blockchain technology into the real world, into where blockchain technology is used to solve real problems of real people in the real world. We have the opportunity to show that this is possible and that blockchain is here to stay.

In Sub-Sahra Africa, only about 3% are insured. It’s hard to be profitable in these regions with traditional finance. Blockchain can help, especially with regulation issues. Technology is the way to unlock insurance for the uninsured. Innovation will be the key. Blockchain offers faster and fewer fees than traditional methods.
Learn more at: https://www.etherisc.com/

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The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/