AMA with Oliver 24th June

Welcome everyone to our latest AMA. I’m Dan Thomson the Marketing Director for InsurAce.

It’s been an interesting couple of months since we first launched our Mainnet. We’ve had lots of product developments and continue to bring out new and improved updates to the InsurAce app and community. We are happy to have you along with us as we work hard to improve every aspect of what we do.

Today we have our founder, Oliver, here to answer some of your questions. The group will be closed off for the first part, opened for the second part for questions. The best 10 questions will be selected by our team and Oliver will answer them in here. These 10 questions will be rewarded with 50 INSUR tokens each. So please make some good questions. Questions about price speculation will not be selected. Without further delay, I would like to introduce Oliver, the founder of InsurAce.

Oliver started to work on InsurAce project since September 2020, and prior to that he worked as the CTO in one of the three largest licensed derivative Exchanges and Clearing Houses. Oliver entered the crypto space back in 2017 where he led a team to research crypto derivatives and blockchain technology and has gravitated towards blockchain-based Open Finance for the past few years. He identified an opportunity for a unique approach to providing insurance for DeFi smart contracts and users, and InsurAce was created.

As always, Oliver, it’s great to have you to come and do these AMA’s for the community…

Please save your questions, we will open up to questions shortly

Hi @oliver4insur, What’s the major progress in the past few weeks?

Oliver Xie | InsurAce Protocol, [24 Jun 2021 at 11:10:19]:

Thanks Dan for hosting the AMA.

dear community folks, how is everyone going.

Although I’m here every day answering various questions, such dedicated AMAs will be good to get everyone updated regularly, and open the channels to hear more voices and address issues. Thanks for everyone’s participation.

Ok, without further ado, let’s start.

yes, we’ve been sharing our progress via our biweekly reports regularly, which can be found on our Medium posts.

Latest one: https://blog.insurace.io/insurace-biweekly-updates-may-31-jun-13-568aeb7dca58

I’ll make a brief summary on what we have been doing and done in the past few months.

1. Token initial launch via balancer LBP in Mid March;

2. Listing on Huobi Global on 1 April;

3. Product Launch on Ethereum Mainnet on 26 April;

4. Launched Multi-Chain insurance services expanding coverage to Binance Smart Chain (BSC), HECO, Polygon, Solana and Fantom, as well as coverage on Centralized Exchanges including FTX, Huobi, Binance and Coinbase in Mid May.

5. Launched to BSC on last Thursday, will continue to build, just joined the BSC Most Valuable Builder (MVB) program.

6. Business development: over $22m covers have been sold, with more than 70K premiums earned, and partnership with some very decent and reputable protocols.

7. Intensive market and community building: getting more traction from media coverages, social media, etc.

Overall, the project team is working hard to deliver products, build traction, serve users and community, and will continue to do so.

D, [24 Jun 2021 at 11:16:27]:

Great to hear it!

So what is coming next?

Oliver Xie | InsurAce Protocol, [24 Jun 2021 at 11:18:39]:

To put it simple: continue the BUIDLing.

To be more specific, a few things we’re working now, and will come out in the upcoming weeks.

1. Continue to enhance our products, such as:

– offering more flexible staking programs, adding more incentives to participants, including sharing of premiums;

– B2B insurance product design;

– Insurance-as-a-service API, for other DeFi protocols to integrate with our services;

– Shield mining programs;

– build investment portal

– redesign of UI/UX.

– Improvement to claim process.

– etc.

2. Business expansion: more covers to be sold, more premium to be earned, and more value accrued to token holders.

3. Continue to work on multi-chain: L2, Solana, and Polkadot;

4. Continue to enhance our marketing to build traction and brand;

5. Community engagement: we want to continuously engage more with our dear community.

Dan

Thanks Oliver. We will now open up the group to community questions. Please submit your questions here, we will close the group again and pick the best 10 questions to answer. These questions will be rewarded with our INSUR tokens after the AMA.

As a reminder, We are not answering questions about price speculation today, but we wanted to address something that does get asked a lot recently regarding price. So we have included two questions here. We will not answer community questions about price in this AMA, however you can ask price questions in our price channel here: https://t.me/UnofficialInsurAcePricetalk

We will try and answer other questions informally later on. Or on our Discord channel after this AMA here

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Questions submitted (over 100!)

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D, [24 Jun 2021 at 11:29:19]:

Wow guys, fantastic response!

Maybe one or two bots I think too 🙂

We are now going to pick 10 questions to answer. These will be answered here by Oliver in the next 15–20 mins

There are some great questions here for InsurAce and Oliver, so we’re going to pick the most interesting.

Oliver: wow, thanks guys for the enthusiasm. I’ll try to pick and answer 10 questions first, then continue to reply other questions subsequently.

We’ll hold such AMAs regularly, sorry if your question is not selected this time, we’ll have other opportunities to work together and earn rewards, just stay with us.

Question

InsurACE operates a capital pool based insurance model. Can you explain the merits and demerits of this model works and how it benefits all parties?

Does InsurACE offers reimbursement for loss of funds through smart contracts hacks or flash loan attack? Do you also have an insurance funds to protect users from impermanent loss?

Oliver: good question on products.

regarding the pros and cons of such capital pool based insurance, we need to know other models of building insurance, such as the peer-to-peer model built by COVER, which is more of like an insurance marketplace to find the counterparty to underwirte the cover, which very flexible and crypto native, but the cost is much much higher than our model, if you take a look at the premium level on Cover, the premium can be as high as 100% more, which is not good for users and wide adoption. However, in our model, we’re pricing the covers more based on actuary approaches and capital management methods, more rigorous and reliable. In a way, the capital pool based insurance is more reasonable, affordable, and built for the common users in DeFi.

We cover smart contract risk, centralized excchange risk and IDO event risk currently (more under design), so yes, we compensate loss for smart contract hacks, but flash loan attack is on a case by case basis. It depends on whether the cover buyer have de facto asset loss or not.

We don’t have insurance to cover IL at the moment, and that’s some inherent risk in the AMM methods, and in a way, it’s unavoidable, it’s really difficult to use insurance to price and cover such risk.

Question

Can you explain to us why InsurAce didn’t choose the cross-chain bridges service available from industry partners? I think it will save you money and can develop on multiple chains faster!

Oliver

Good question and insights.

As you can see, we launched to BSC last week, but together, we launched our cross-chain bridge (fully built in-house). It must be weired why we don’t adopt other cross-chain solutions, but to build it by ourselves. To re-invent wheels are normally not good options.

Let me share our thoughts here.

We did look at a few 3rd party solutions, such as poly.network, chain.xyz, etc., but there’re some potential security risks there, such as the minter role permissions, etc.. There’s risk that 3rd party do evil, and we suffer, espeicially when we’re an insurance project, we always put security as our top priority. WE don’t wanna to run the risk of getting exploited by 3rd party bridges. This may not happen, but we’re concerned about this.

Also, build our own bridge is not only more secure, it’s also more scalable. We intened to expand to not only BSC, but also Solana, HECO and more, but not every bridge solution can support all these, especially when our token is listed on Huobi, we can get their support to chain exchagne + heco + cross chain bridges together, which a big advantage.

So to summarize: security + scalability, that’s why we choose to do in this way, and our engineer team work really hard to get this done quickly with high quality. Kudos to them.

Question

How secured is your smart contracts code, did you ever audit it via any third party? What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in YOUR PROJECT development?

Oliver

Yes, definitely, as i said, we put security as our top priority. We got audited by SlowMist in April (https://files.insurace.io/public/security/InsurAce-DeFi%20Smart%20Contract%20Security%20Audit%20Report.pdf), indentified as Low Risk.

and currently we’re under auditing by PeckShield, targeting to complete by 1st half of July, the auditing report will be pulished then.

and we’ll continue to invest in auditing.

Question

Can you list 1–2 killer features of this project that makes it ahead of its competitors? What is the competitive advantage your project has that you feel most confident about?

Oliver

you’re right, every project needs killer features, just like every wave of tech revolution.

For our project, the killer features are:

i) portfolio-based coverage: users can cover one and/or multiple risks in a portfolio, to lower their cost, save their gas fee and time.

ii) investment capabilities: offer high returns for participants, not just normal token rewards, but also sharing of premiums and investment returns.

I feel most confident about our project is that we have a really dedicated and resillient team that keep working to ship progress, also we got really strong community and investor support.

Question

What is PROJECT’s revenue model? In which ways do you generate revenue/profit?

Oliver

The revenue model is made in 3 parts:

1. Premium sales for insurance coverage. These are generated from users and projec teams looking to cover their assets against smart contract hacks and bugs currently.

2. The second comes from our yet to be released investment pools. These investment pools will be from users’ funds staked with us into either low risk or high risk pools in which will be re-invested into various partner protocols in both high yield and lower yield pools which will generate returns for our stakers, as well as helping to further reduce our premiums for users.

3. Other fees generated in the due course.

And these revenue will accurue back to our token holders in a proper form eventually.

Question

It’s quite unfortunate that many projects have infiltrated the market with just white papers without having any genuine use cases. What are the main utilities of your coin?

Oliver

Yes, i’ve seen a few questions asking about the use cases of our token, so i’ll reply altogether here.

first of all, our project has been moving forward far from the whitepaper stage, we’ve live products on both Ethreum and BSC, and live user adoption and sales. So the first part of the question doesn’t stand here.

As for the use cases of the token:

1. governance token, used for protocol governance in various cases, such as claim, IIP (InsurAce Improvement Proposals), etc.

2. accrue values to the token holder via the fees / income generate on the platform, such as the 3 revenue sources mentioned above (premium, investment return, other fees, etc), which is same as the value capture of other DeFi blue chips.

3. once our ecosystem expands, this token will be used in the whole ecosystem.

Question

the minimum amount of staking is 500insur and it locked for a month. why don’t you make it no minimum amount and can be unlocked anytime?

Oliver

good question. I hear your advice, and some upgrades regarding this are in progress.

These limitations are necessary at the early stage of our product, to prevent risk, espeically the 30-day lock-up, which is a common practice in insurance protocols to mitigate the liquidity risk. Imagine that all users pull out the stakings all at once, and the capital pool is empty, the insurance framework will be in danger.

Meanwhile, we are keeping these limits slightly raised to save on gas fees for both ourselves and the users to make the percentage cost of the gas fees a lower amount which allows for higher yields on the returns gained through staking. We keep it locked for a month, and then a 30 day release of rewards to stop any large liquidity moving at once and give us time to adjust staking rewards if we need to incentivise more users to stake funds with us.

The user can then withdraw their funds and rewards and restake for higher yields. We have not added an auto-compounding feature at this time but it’s in our task list to be provided in subsuquent releases. Stay tuned.

Question

What do I need to provide when I submit a claim request

Oliver

We’re handling our first claim case currently, you may find my message here for your reference: https://t.me/InsurAce_Channel/99

Basically, the cover holders need to submit the claim together with sufficient proof of loss during the cover period which is stated in the cover or within 30 days after the cover expires.

When InsurAce receives a claim application, the Advisory Board will investigate and verify the case based on the materials applicant submit and other information available. The Advisory Board will then make a Claim Reference Report containing the investigation findings, and draw a conclusion as well as make a reference opinion on the claim.

Here is our recent claim investigation report: https://files.insurace.io/public/claim/ClaimInvestigationReport_1.pdf

The Claim Proposal will first be subject to voting by the community Claim Assessor. The default voting window is 36 hours. If more than 75% of the Claim Assessor participate in the voting, this voting will be deemed as Valid Voting. Otherwise, we will consider this as Invalid Voting and this case will be assessed by the Advisory Board. The Advisory Board will have the sole discretion in making the final decision.

Question

What might I need your insurance for?

Oliver

Insurance is like your parachute in your flight in the DeFi space.

We protect against smart contract hacks and bugs. So if you look at some recent high-profile DeFi hacks that have lost users funds… pancake bunny, easyfi network, impossible finance, eleven finance. These are all solid projects that were unfortunately attacked and users funds siphoned off by hackers. By offering insurance services to users, for a small percentage premium, users can sleep safe knowing that if there is a hack then they will have their funds reimbursed to them through InsurAce.

Example =>

Anchor Protocol is a major protocol we listed recently, which is a crypto stablecoin, like a decentralised savings bank with an 18% APY. We offer insurance on this for around 3% which means that you can have a protected stablecoin asset allocation with a 15% guaranteed APY no matter if there are any attacks or bugs in the smart contract.

With insurance, you get yields and sleep tight. Without insurance, you get yields but with fright.

Question

Which one of these aspects important for you?

1-Increasing Token Price&Value

2-Empowering Platform Development

3-Building Community Trust

4-Expanding Partnership Globally

In what order?

Oliver

Ser, no pain, no gain.

2 & 3 & 4 are the pains we need to take, and 1 is the gain to get. Only when 2 & 3 & 4 are well done, 1 will be well shown.

So, these are all important. I hope our community, users, token holders, investors will all get 1 eventually. Cheers.

Thank you to everyone for coming, we will reach out to the community members with the questions we have selected so we can get their wallet addresses.

As always, feel free to ask questions here or in Discord (https://discord.com/invite/vCZMjuH69F), and you can find all of our links here: https://telegra.ph/List-of-resources-InsurAce-05-12

We will post these questions and answers to a medium post soon as well as some recent questions and answers from our community.

thank you so much @oliver4insur as always.

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