A couple of other ideas mostly based around weather data.
Cancelling of sporting events, festivals, concerts
Wedding venues (especially with COVID and state government regulations changing)
Home building delays in construction, private and public
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We just had a interesting discussion on the telegram about possible insurances 
I´ll give a small recap so we can discuss it further here.
topic.
Insurances as smart contracts only make sense when you have insurance that can be triggered by some sort of real world datapoints.
real world data or parametric data could be wind speed, amount of rain, yes or no parametrics. This data needs to be reliable and trustfull.
about parametric health insurance was saidâŚâYou canât build an insurance on blockchain that executes a payout for cancer treatment just bc you say you have cancer for example. â
âOne of the big problems is that doctors and insurance companies will do scams all the time too. If you do payout based on doctors signing off suddenly youâre going to have organized crime trying to recruit doctors to feed in fake stuff. I kinda get the sense that any trust based model is going to run into the same problems as the current systems. â
âAlways think of how hard it would be to have trustfull parametric data for the insurance. If itâs easy tamperable or to hard to get the data the insurance you want is probably not for the foreseeable future. That said, there are a lot of iot sensors being designed and integrated in everyday machinery etc so it could go faster then you think. â
an other idea was offered as such:
âI think we should go after areas entirely uninhabited by traditional insurance because those are so numerous and varied they probably represent a bigger market overall than healthcare insurance (actually probably not, but still quite large). â
âLetâs insure against either internet or server downtime. Imagine if RH investors could insure against Robin Hood downtime on a day their options are expiring, when they need to execute or their options expire worthlessâŚâ
âJust generally Iâm sure traders would insure against network outages in their area, or binance/coinbase pro/ etc. having server issues on particularly volatile days.â
"Yeah thats cool too! But, health insurance or automobile insurance would be great. Like a way for someone to each month stake a depreciating asset in a pool that accrues interest and based on amount out into the pool each month a persons insured amount changes .
Example: insert 100 dip into a pool where 9 others have done the same. Pool = 1,000 . Interest = 5% split between 10 people. Each month, if no one files claim, the pool increases $1,000. As more people enter the pool the pool grows, and interest compounds increasing the amount everyone in the pool are insured."
"The problem is the data inputs, as others mentioned. It would be almost impossible to do anything like health insurance for time being. Decentralized insurance can only insure on outcomes with deterministic, quantifiable, and verifiable data
âThis is more a kind of social insurance right? Is allready possible but parametric kinda hard. I thought it would be nice to do this with people you know and safe up for a rainy day, or maybe do something nice with it, it thought to do it multisig instead of with a smartcontractâ
we argued that lifeinsurance was possible if your death certificate is verifiable on the blockchain.
what are your oppinions ideas about this topic? let us know!
Is it possible that an internet connected car could automatically push crash data out and trigger insurances without people even having to call it in? Like if it was a Tesla, it would pull the carâs camera info and IDK if the car knows damage yet, but yeah, as that car tech increases with time, it becomes more possible to automate the whole process.
Excited to be on here! Per requests, I am moving my part of this discussion onto the forum so itâs available for posterity.
I think we should go after areas entirely uninhabited by traditional insurance because those are so numerous and varied they probably represent a bigger market overall than healthcare insurance (actually probably not, but still quite large). â
Letâs insure against either internet or server downtime. Imagine if RH investors could insure against Robin Hood downtime on a day their options are expiring, when they need to execute or their options expire worthlessâŚâ
âJust generally Iâm sure traders would insure against network outages in their area, or binance/coinbase pro/ etc. having server issues on particularly volatile days
These were all comments from me on telegram. But yes - I think this would an easy product to implement (relative to many other insurance products) as it is black-and-white, there is no room for gray, no room for interpretation, extrapolation, etc. Either your network was offline or it wasnât. Either a server went down or it did not. And this data is available in abundance (just Google is [insert app] down or is the internet down in [x location with z provider] and youâll find tons of websites with real-time data. Note: would link to more stories and facts except there is a link limit of two.
So I imagine we could easily just request this data from Chainlink and there may be nodes who can fulfill it through free APIs right away. If thereâs not already an adaptor and/or free API for this, we could just build an external adaptor to one or more of the premium APIs and add it to market.link. Here are some APIs that we could leverage: Dotcom-Monitor, Cloud Watch for AWS servers, or just simply DownDetector Enterprise (good list of these here). Iâm sure there are loads of others. So getting this data on-chain and into Etherisc smart contractors is easy enough and the outcomes are really only binary for our needs.
I know, just for myself, that apps crashing, exchanges going offline, or just general service provider downtime has been a constant source of anxiety and, in at least two instances, caused significant financial harm. This is obviously exacerbated with the pandemic work-from-home dynamics that have strained providers and servers alike. When you hold a bunch of options contracts or other time-based derivatives, it is essential that you have an uninterrupted stable connection to trade or execute your contracts. We saw lots of losses in TradFi this year when the March crash caused several trading platforms to go offline. When Robin Hood crashed in early March, a lot of people lost loads of money when they could not execute ITM options, cover shorts, etc.
I would certainly buy insurance for my trading platformâs network status on specific days or for specific time frames. And this data we can probably get for free through something like Atlassianâs Statuspage. If Robin Hood was down during my specified time-period, I would be covered. And if it is not down (i.e. 99% of the time), Etherisc makes money.
There really is not a market for this yet AFAIK. For one, itâs kind of a new phenomenon with DeFi exploding in value at play and legacy finance has also seen an explosion of retail playing with time-sensitive financial instruments, so thereâs been little time to set up this type of product through legacy insurance. Secondly, itâs probably too niche of a market for legacy insurance to bother with. But itâs perfect for Etheriscâs audience as the cross-over between legacy financeâs retail âapesâ and crypto traders is probably significant. The amount of money on the table that is vulnerable to downtime/outages/tech issues has been on a parabolic rise both on-chain and off. Just yesterday we saw Binance go offline for maintenance during a high volatility period, seriously hurting many usersâ bottom lines.
In conclusion, some version of this product is probably the best I can think of for Etherisc at this early stage. Itâs about as simple to create as anything and It solely requires deterministic data for which there are many APIs to leverage. And beyond merely being an easy product to implement, you would be hard pressed to find a better audience fit than this one. Maybe 1 out of every 100,000 flyers knows what blockchain is or uses it. Conversely, the target audience for my proposed product category is already seeded disproportionately with crypto-aware people.
This is definetly a possibility, since like you said it´s totaly deterministic and this can be checked with verifiable data, would be a perfect case for etherisc.
What I´m having a little doubt is the pricing, some people are trading millions, others just pennies. Would you make different premiums for different segments? Also the pricing, how much would be payed out in case of downtime?
It´s deff a really cool idea to think about and i see potential in it!
You would buy as much coverage you wanted. You value your own time / access. I think this would follow somewhat of a curve model where the more you buy, the higher your premium would be proportionately, but not sure. Nexus, I think, just has a flat rate no matter how much you buy.
On certain major days for traders, thereâd potentially be huge amounts of money to be made as people are willing to pay Etherisc .5% of their investment for for .1% chance they cannot execute on it because a server crashed. If you just have $5k of money at play, then you buy coverage up to $5k for $25. If you have $1M at play on that day, you pay $5,000 to hedge against downtime on that day.
I havenât fully thought this through, obviously, but I just think it would be a potentially big market. I donât know much about gamers, or online poker, or other such things, but I imagine there would interest there, too, in this type of product. Another use case might be for DLT node operators, in various formats, who can face severe repercussions if they lose their network connection. A Chainlink node might need to insure against that possibility once staking goes live.
Would love to see Wallet Insurance go live soon. Itâs something much needed in the crypto ecosystem. With that being said, bring it all on.