February InsurAce Community AMA Recap

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the community AMA with our CMO, Dan Thomson.

We’ve touched a lot great topics in the AMA.

For those who missed it, here’s a recap for you.


Dan
Hi everyone!

Sorry it’s been so long since we’ve done one of these, despite January seeming like 70 weeks long, it’s been a very busy period all round.

We hope everyone had a good holiday period, and is ready for 2023.

I’m Dan, the CMO here at InsurAce, I’ll be giving everyone a bit of an update and then answering any questions you guys might have.

We had hoped to get our CEO Oliver on today, but he’s just had a baby and has his hands full this week. But he’ll be here for the next one!

To give everyone an update on what we’ve been working on…

Hopefully you caught our new roadmap:

We have some pretty great stuff coming up.

We were meant to have the bridge cover out this week around this AMA, but it’s been pushed back a little due to our bridge partner having some technical difficulties with their upgrades.

So we should have a new product out in the next few weeks: the Post Audit Cover.

This will allow us to sell b2b to new protocols via partner Auditors

Our team are still working tirelessly on everything, but with a large part of resources allocated to the upcoming CDIS… which will be the FDIC for crypto…. a huge step in the right direction for protecting crypto investors globally.

Read more about that here:

https://www.insurace.io/blog/?p=3663

And in the not so distant future we have some cool features coming up and updates to the app, as well as new products like:

  • Slashing Cover
  • Wallet Cover
  • Bug Bounty Cover
  • MPC Cover

Here’s a teaser for an upcoming NFT collection we will be bringing to you in April for our 2nd birthday.

Details will come out about these soon to get you all very excited.


And on the whole our team are still here, working hard to increase sales and TVL where possible to help get InsurAce to where it needs to be. The number 1 insurance protocol in crypto. So we can make crypto safer for everyone together.

We’ve:

  • Added more capacity for most protocols
  • Increased cover length possibility to 6 months
  • Restarted some custodian riskcovers

Lastly, before I start to answer some questions, we’d like to thank the community for the continued support. There seems to be more activity in the groups lately which is fantastic, and we appreciate all of the suggestions. We hope to make you all proud and generate value and improve the token value to reward those most loyal.


Discord Questions:

*Please leave your future questions in our AMA channel in discord: https://discord.com/channels/778972805127471154/1064503637486866432

Dan
To start with, i’m going to answer some pre-submitted questions from our discord channel.

Question 1:

Some understands crypto well but some don’t but Everyone Understands Passive Income for sure. How would you encourage both crypto and non-crypto users to use your platform benefits?


Dan
We want to introduce non-crypto people to this space. But the reality is that we are at the deep end of DeFi. The best we can do is continue to work to bridge the gap from defi to tradfi.

We’re working on getting a licensed regulated entity so that we can encourage tradfi insurance to re-insure us… reducing the need for staking capital too.


Question 2:

Could you please provide the audit reports of InsureAce.io as security has been a major concern for DeFi protocols/projects, so as to assure users how secured the project is?

Dan
https://docs.insurace.io/landing-page/documentation/security-1


Question 3:

Hi, why is the Capital Efficiency Ratio % (leverage on assets) so low at 30+% when it used to be much higher? Too high is risky but too low is not efficient either.

Dan
This is a good question.

This is due to fluctuating sales and tvl recently. We can go higher, but not as high as we were before.

But also following big incidents and the recent explosion of AI into the space, we’re being on the cautious side since the AI can be used to exploit protocols with potential weaknesses.


Question 4:

And in your opinion, at the moment what are the factors keeping the insurace token from heading higher (unlike some others in the recent rally)? Thanks

Dan
The fundamental issue is the tokenomics are still only used for governance and rewards, which does generate a little sell pressure.

But this will see a sharp improvement with more use cases and updated tokenomics that can work to counteract this.

The project is one of the few in the space with real revenues. Arguably our revenues are higher than projects with 10x our MC.

Adoption is taking time, TVL in DeFi is still low. But it is growing again, so we should see a resurgence in sales and value soon


Question 5:

Please could you give us some hints about your views for the long term direction of InsurAce’s governance?

At the moment, $INSUR holders can participate in claims assessment and receive new token issuance as a reward. Will holders ever be able to participate in broader governance decisions for the whole organisation?

And will holders ever take a share of the profits?

Or is the intention that InsurAce should remain an entirely private endeavour?

And if so, do you fear disruption from a community-run competitor?

And, in terms of your multichain strategy, where do you see InsurAce moving next?

Some suggestions are Arbitrum, Optimism and Fantom. Are you planning on building more cross-chain functionality into the product offering?

Dan
These were all submitted at once, so I’ll answer briefly for each.

Long term direction of governance, we are moving towards a full DAO model. There are still many issues with DAOs that we are cautious of, and so dont want to rush into it too fast.

Yes we’ll be rolling out more DAO governance options soon for the community to be more active in the protocol

Profit sharing is something that has always been in the plans

We’re not looking to remain private. And are not worried about competitors. It’s a tough space with a lot of potential market. We have one of the best teams in the space and are bringing some of the leading innovations

Multi chain is interesting. We didnt see too much extra adoption from deployment to new chains. But it’s not completely off the books.

However, seeing how chains come and go, we are again being more careful about deployments.

Plus, our cross-chain coverage allows us to cover them anyway


Question 6:

What do you see is the biggest reason for people not buying Insurance? How about biggest reason which InsurAce can affect? E.g., greed, distrust, lack of knowledge of InsurAce etc.

Dan
This is a much more difficult one to answer.

We have regular requests from big institutions wanting to cover 10+ million, but we cant cover that with our capacity at the moment.

TVL in defi is right down, meaning it’s mostly the degens left and they tend not to consider insurance.

APYs are also low on most protocols we cover now so the cost of insurance is much higher.

Following the UST case and FTX we’ve had to be more specific in our policy wording, maybe that has become limiting.

Awareness and adoption is still an issue. And I think we still need to overcome the stigma that insurance doesnt work.

We would love for more protocols to have a button linking to us, but they usually dont want to favour one offering over another, or dont want to add too much to their UX/UI

But that said, the new products we have coming out will add new revenue streams and opportunities for different styles of business…

  • Post Audit cover will be sold b2b
  • Bridge cover will be transactional (per bridge transaction)
  • CDIS works with CeFi to sell covers as an integration with them

Telegram Group Now Open For Question

Question 1:

It would be better if the team could first endow tokens with practicality.

Dan
Personally I agree, however as part of the team, we have decided that the updated tokenomics should come out with our Marketplace.

As part of the marketplace updates, we will be able to use them for various uses within the app as well as give some additional features as we’ve discussed before.


Question 2:

Why Insur is not taking advantage of all the momentum that arbitrum his having in these days, and plan to add arbitrum or optimism into the list of networks supported by INSUR?

Dan
The Marketplace update will be a huge step for the protocol, allowing a far broader range of services and products to become available.


Question 3:

Seems like you really forgot about tokenholders and the roadmap continues to have delays… A lot of things wrote on the blog had to happen in 2022.

Dan
Deploying to new chains just to chase the recent hype doesnt result in sales or new users. It may give a temporary spike in price, but doesnt affect real value.

We can already cover protocols on these chains (and we already do!), there’s no benefit to deploying to them other than trying to just get quick spikes in token value.

2022 did not go to plan, anyone’s plan.

If we look back to where we were a year ago, we had so many things in the pipeline and everything was growing monthly… up to $300k a month in premium sales.

$UST/Luna/Terra and FTX were two huge incidents that rocked the whole industry and disrupted a lot of those plans, not just for us but for everyone.

They both caused us to take a step back, evaluate and plan accordingly.

I dont think it is unreasonable for plans to change given such monumental events in a nascent industry.


Question 4:

We have to increase the Number of token holders, with 300$ in INSUR I have the 0.3% of Power during claim votes, can we really talk about decentralization?

Dan
I dont think that’s exactly true. Maybe for some of the smaller votes. But the bigger votes (like UST), see a huge amount more volume coming in for votes.

Also, since votes have gone the way you would expect so far, it doesnt seem like there’s much of an issue in terms of claims voting. It would be more concerning if the votes went the wrong way, it would show a fundamental flaw in governanc

The reality is that when there is a vote that may affect stakers, there are two sides to consider… the ones claiming who want the payout and the ones staking who dont want to lose money. Either side could buy up INSUR to influence votes.

But as I’ve said, so far this hasnt been an issue.

It is also one of the main issue facing most DAOs in the space. So it’s not a unique problem to us. Governance is tricky which is why we are rolling out our DAO model step by step


Question 5:

Many Option, but first, reduce scr mining release.

Dan
If we reduce the SCR, then there will be less stakers… this leads to less TVL and therefore less capacity to sell covers.

Less cover sales makes it near impossible to generate any kind of profit that could be distributed

It is currently at a fair balance between these forces for now


Question 6:

You should reduce the number of tokens released on the market or add an burn process. Basically, The reason why Bitcoin is expensive is that it is difficult to get.

Dan
We have a fixed total supply too. So it has the same logic.

Burns dont help our protocol here. The tokens are required for the staking rewards.

However, we are also exploring a burn-to-bond model that would achieve both of these in one go


Question 7:

How much coverage can increase when reinsurance is deployed? What are you going to do if the company runs out of tokens to give as rewards? At 100% circulating

Dan
The re-insurers we’re talking to are interested in re-insuring around $10m each to start with.

This is factored into the tokenomics… when tokens for mining run out, then obviously it slows down the sell pressure and rewards for stakers can be derived from income.

By that time we should also have things like the re-insurance options which will allow us to sell more (generate higher income) for less need for stakers… so more profits… which can go into buybacks and redistribution for holders.

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