Oliver Xie / InsurAce

Oliver Xie on InsurAce's insurance solutions for DeFi

InterviewJuly 22, 202121:48

In this episode

Ashton Addison speaks with Oliver Xie, the project lead of InsurAce.io. Oliver discusses InsurAce's insurance solutions for the DeFi industry, the current challenges and pitfalls of DeFi, why Insurance is needed, why Smart Contracts Audits have downsides and are different from Insurance, the INSUR token, their partners, and what's next on the InsurAce.io roadmap.

Key takeaways
  • InsurAce provides three types of DeFi insurance products: smart contract risk, centralized exchange risk, and oracle event risk coverage.
  • InsurAce's portfolio-based coverage allows users to insure multiple protocols in a single transaction, reducing gas fees and premiums compared to buying individually.
  • InsurAce uses risk assessment questionnaires with over 40 questions to determine pricing, rather than relying solely on staking amounts like some competitors.
  • InsurAce operates across eight different blockchain chains and covers assets in over 50 different DeFi protocols as of the interview date.
  • InsurAce launched its token in March and deployed to Ethereum mainnet in April, with additional deployments on BSC and other networks.

Transcript

Read the full transcript 3,557 words, auto-generated and lightly edited

likewise thank you so much for being here i'm excited to dive into the world of blockchain and insurance in d5 i think it's especially important and a lot of people don't fully understand why it's needed and how important it really is in this wild west of crypto right now so i would love for you to kick it off for us with an overview of insure ace

and some of the solutions that your team is bringing to the space and then we can dive into the details yeah sure okay so i think you just use a very good word that the while the west i mean of thing of the crypto space yeah i think it is it is the truth that the crypto space is very well currently especially in terms of the security so i think you probably have seen you

know various kind of hiking events news here and there you know this product look up hack that part will got hacked so i think overall what we do is to you know use insurance service and products to make this dfi or crypto a safer place yeah so for insurance protocol where i define you know insurance protocol and targeting to provide reliable

robust and secure d5 insurance services to the d5 users and at the same time provide sustainable investment return to our users as well so we started this project from september last year and closed our serum respect from defiance and perfect capital hashed in hobby and a few other renowned you know investors and we

launched our token in march this year and lastly zero main nights in the second half of april so up to enough we have now to the sierra mainnet for around three months and we also noticed is bsc in neptune so overall we have covered around a certain meaning of total d5 assets for over 50 of different e5 protocols are eight

different chains so we are a market chain you know define insurance protocol right now you know with our products and services i think we can safeguard the divide assets and overall make divide a safer place for everyone definitely and that's great to hear oliver about all the projects and eight different chains as well already and it's great to just hear that

just to hear that the d5 space is growing that quickly as well and that's why i think that insurance is needed in d5 because it is growing so quickly and it is the wild west and there's not always the safeguards just from the team itself and the smart contract and there's other potential areas where things can go wrong and you talked about that you're in

deploying a variety of products and services into the space to help secure assets protect investors and protect the teams maybe you can dive a little bit deeper into the products you know how specifically maybe give an example of how some of their main products work and are helping protect investors that are investing into d5 products yeah sure so currently we are

providing three types of insurance products one is a smart contract risk and second one is covering the centralized exchange risk and third one is about the ideal event risk so of course the smart contract risk insurance is a major product that we're providing right now so it works something like this let's say ashton you are a divide user and you're doing farming on

different d5 protocols and somehow you're kind of not so confident or you're kind of afraid that you got hacked and put money into some of the i mean d5 protocols then again you can come to us and buy a coverage for your t5 protocol or your i mean your t5 i said those protocols and once your asset in those protocols got hacked you can come to us request for claim so

we'll kind of give you this type of compensation when you suffer from a loss so that's how it basically works and let me give you another example is that if what i just mentioned is about nasty ashton you're an e5 user another example is that let's see ashland you're running a d5 project you're one of the project team right you're also afraid that and launching

a d5 project but at the same time i'm afraid that my project got hacked then my tokens my assets my users would just be you know everyone would suffer so you can come to us and work together and we will provide type of coverage for your project i think that's another type of support we can provide as well so basically we can provide the defined

insurance products to divide users and project teams as well yeah that's great to hear that you're protecting on both sides both the project and the investors because it's not just the investors that can get the short end of the stick sometimes you deploy a smart contract and you know as they say you don't really know how secure your contract is until it gets hacked with the code

being open source and it's sitting there and sometimes the team doesn't notice a bug in the contract and some black hat hackers come along and find a bug in the code so that's great to know and you mentioned that you're already working with a lot of different protocols i think that's really great and it is definitely needed in this space right now and i know that there's

some other insurance you know there's there's a huge market for insurance in d5 so there are other platforms that are coming and trying to provide solutions in the market do you see a specific unique identifier or competitive advantage for insurers in the defy insurance space as opposed to other regular insurance protocols and why are all of these projects choosing insurance

For their insurance service yeah sure i think you're right i think insurance product it works in a way we call it like rainy shoes you know you will never think of it when it's sunshine i would say right however in the rains you will be oh where's my you know my umbrella or my ring shoes right so that's pretty much how insurance works

we provide kind of you know precaution measures to you know to your system so compared to other defined protocols out there in the market i believe i heard a few names named their necklaces neutral neck cover so basically what we do is kind of a difference firstly what we all we can provide uniquely is called a portfolio based

coverage so let's see ashton you are doing farming on five or six different d5 protocols if you buy if you want five insurance for those different particles one of the ways you can do is you buy them one by one on nexus neutral or on insurance you can definitely buy them one by one however another model we can provide uniquely is you can buy this together

as a portfolio which can help you save the premium civil guest fee and save your time especially next move back to april and may when the east gas fee was was crazy right we can win a lot of that because you are doing multiple protection just in one transaction and also the priming can be saved or not and actually just yesterday i did a non

post on my i'm a teacher you know discussing about this portfolio-based coverage again which a user bought a portfolio-based coverage for maker dial for wi-fi and also for sushi swap and he actually receives more than 16 compared to you know buy them one by one are necessarily true so of course definitely we respect nexus neutral but this is definitely

something that insurance is offering you know very uniquely okay so this is the first one i think yeah i think the second one is that our pricing strategy is different so let's say for some of the other financial protocols their pricing is mostly based on staking in a way that the more staking it comes into a protocol the more the lower the prime is however

that actually creates some issues especially when for those new default protocols right people may be kind of afraid of the risk and they would not stick into that protocol so that creates an issue that the pricing is very high however it is actually just these new products that need the insurance most however for us we are doing the pricing into

in a different way based on risk assessment so we will you know provide a questionnaire with over 40 different questions to the project teams asking them to provide this information and after that we will run a risk assessment to decide on private platform and in this way we can have a more accurate and reasonable assessment on a protocol and give a

primary method so the kind of you know pricing is also different of course we have quite a few other different you know designs that we have an investment arm which is going to provide hair returns because you know all these facts that you stick into interest they can be you know used for investment and generate you know investment returns

again which is a classic design even in the traditional insurance sector as well right just like what about this doing right on the on the one hand they're providing insurance services and on the right hand they are doing investment but again this will work together to provide you know security and as well as instant returns to the users as well

yeah so pretty much there are quite a few you know differences in terms of product design but i think these are some of the feature likes yeah definitely and that's i think those are great complementary services to provide so i'm really interested to see how that continues to grow oliver and sort of basing that off of berkshire hathaway's motto there

And you mentioned a couple other great points there about the staking and also just about saving the gas fees which you know at some point is can be hundreds of dollars per transaction which it adds up a lot so i'm glad that your team has thought of that as well and thinking around that and around the staking as well i know that there is the ensure

token that's also involved in the ecosystem and i'm guessing it has to play a role with these competitive advantages as well and i would love for you to just elaborate on how exactly it does play a role and what are the main functionalities of the insure token within insurance yeah sure so basically intro token of course it's not any other default token

it's a governance token as a as a as a first so currency token you can use it for voting you can use it for community governance that's the first one i think instead of discussing about the utilities or use cases i think we were more of focusing on the value creations by capture for the initial tokens so for us as an interest platform you know we have a multitude of

you know sources for to generate income like we can you know earn the premium or every car we sell you know we can get some premium and currently we have earned over 30 130 k of premium in just past two to three months and like the mesmerizers and now some of the other phases like we are we have guild and crosstown bridge where we can

charge some of the crosston bridge transferring phase and also nike will have the when people at stake they may be charged a very neat amount of fees so in a way that we can generate all these different sources of income and the token will be used for a way to distribute all those fees or income generated on the platform back to the token holders

so i think it's a currency token and it can where we are planning to add it to we can use it to buy insurance to use it to buy investment products but let's try some utilities but i think the most important it has is when decoration and one capture that these tokens can stand for and you know claim to the fees and revenue generated on the platform i think that will create some

sustainable values to the token holders definitely and thank you for that explanation oliver and you mentioned there that you're planning on integrating a few more features as you continue to grow the platform you're already working with a lot of teams but i'm curious on as you continue to expand what are some of the major milestones on your team's roadmap to

deliver out new products and updates for say the rest of 2021 yeah sure i think so far we are pretty much aligned with our existing roadmap and currently we are working on a few new i think excited development there first one is about api so i think there is current there's that problem that you know the d5 service is good but it's just you know

too far away from the end users right next let's say actually you do the farm first then you will start to think hey maybe i can get an insurance then you will start to think about nexus mutual stuff think about insurance then you get to us you know buy insurance right there is still you know distances between you your farm and your buy insurance right so in a

way we are currently developing an api that we can integrate just into the business process of other defect protocols so that's it when you are doing farming then there will there be an option that for you if you want to get insured you can just take the box and the book you get insured so that api would be used to be seamlessly integrated with

other d5 protocols so it will help us to expand our sales network and also provide better user experience as well so the api environment i think it will come up in the next two to three weeks and the second one is about market chain expansion so i think everybody is talking about martijn right and currently we have been deployed to ethereum mainline and also bse

actually we have prepared everything ready to deploy on panica so i think that will come up in the next well two weeks as well and also we actually we have up to haiku i mean the whole big ecosystem chain and the preparations are almost ready up there but because of the recent you know recognitions in china you know you know so there were kind of

recognition uncertainties there so we'll put back a bit a little bit there and also we built the in-house i mean crosston bridge of course there are you know a number a number of different costume bridge projects out there where people can just use it for crosston you know token bridge right however we built our in-house one as well which is i think more secure i think you

probably have seen the hacking event to change for or sorry they changed yeah i think it's changed back to a few days ago i think it's nicely right so the crosston bridge has some security issues there as well but for us we built an in-class fund so that will help us a lot in our marketing expansion and also we are looking at sonata as well i think we are very close together

so not a break as well so overall i think martian expansion is another big strategy for us to go as well yeah i think then the third one is about we'll continue to you know upgrade our token economy and create more values but more importantly accurate those values to the token holders and users as well yeah so i think these are pretty much some of the

Major directions we're going to develop oh i think i forgot to mention one is about institutional insurance instead yeah i think recently let's say you have seen ave compound are starting to target at the institution customers right i think for those institutions who come into d5 they can they can work on they can do landing and powering a compound

harvey but at the same time i think insurance is another indispensable part as well because you know every you for the institutions they may you know take security more at the hair level right so if insurance can just follow up and provide them for some insurance products and services i think that would be a very good market fit so api to expand you know sales network

and marketing expansion and also institutional grade of insurance and also upgrade our token economy so i think these are pretty much some of the you know milestones should be implemented very soon yeah definitely all sound like very promising updates oliver i will be excited to watch those roll out in the coming weeks with some of them as you mentioned

and for the viewers that are looking to follow along with those updates learn more about insure ace try out the insurance on these d5 protocols what is the best way for them to get involved i think you mean how we can get involved in divine insurance right yeah yeah i think now it's it's pretty much easy is that i think there's a slight

difference here is that insurance is more of an i would say risk management role right so when you come into d5 you'll probably come to then lindy and boring or dax you do some training you do some lending and borrowing you do some farming first then you will think about you know insurance right so i think that's why insurance is kind of

not so expen not so expo explosive you know at the first stage of d5 but i think it has a long-term play potential there right so i think for users after you depth deep into d5 i think eventually you will start to think about how i can not just make money but i can make money securely right so then you will think about us right all the other i mean different

insurance protocols out there yeah so basically for the device users after you see you have worked on other different particles then if you are worried about if you can sneak tight during the night with your d5 bags just come to us yeah use our service yeah sounds great oliver thank you so much for coming on the show i really appreciate you bringing more awareness around

insurance and ensure ace to these d5 protocols because i think it is a really great thing i will leave the insure ace website and the social links in the description box below as well for the viewers to get involved in the communities and to see the website all the best with these updates that your team is rolling out in the coming weeks and let's follow up in the near future

yeah sure i think our website is insurance dot io so just just come to our website and take a look yeah and ashton thanks for hosting me today is renee a pleasure to be our program and hope more and more people you know will come to d5 and especially come to d5 in a secure way yeah

you

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