Etherisc, a Munich-based Insurtech startup, has bagged the Blockchain Oscar for Most Innovative Blockchain Startup.
Produced by The Cointelegraph, the competition was a part of Blockshow Europe 2017. Six promising startups were shortlisted. During the final ceremony on 6 April 2017, Etherisc presented the project to a jury and received a prize of €5,000.
"BlockShow Europe is a major international event for showcasing established blockchain solutions," according to its organizers. "Blockchain can provide every company with transparency and disintermediation, help with process integrity, and just simplify things."
Etherisc aims to make the purchase and sale of insurance more efficient, enable lower operational costs, provide greater transparency to the insurance industry, and democratize access to reinsurance investments.
Commenting on winning the award, co-founder Christoph Mussenbrock said, "It is a great honor and an amazing boost for our endeavor to create an open protocol for decentralized insurance applications."
"Etherisc is a company that promises to disrupt and transform a large part of the global insurance industry for millions of travelers. It can offer a variety of new products and services to customers, while leveraging blockchain technology to achieve new levels of transparency and kick off a new era of policy securitization."
Etherisc focuses on writing individual policies for flight delays with its winning submission. Built on the Ethereum blockchain, the Flight Delay Dapp is described as "a parametric insurance application for consumers". In an alpha test, it provided flight delay insurance to attendees of an Ethereum developer conference.
According to the official release, Etherisc's decentralized insurance market will use cryptographic tokens to create what its co-founders Stephan Karpischek and Christoph Mussenbrock call "highly customized economics. Our goal is to tokenize reinsurance risks and make them available on a global open access marketplace," they said.
"This strategy provides both flexibility and scale for decentralized insurance risk pools, enables new types of insurance products, makes the product extremely safe for customers, and democratizes access to reinsurance investments," they said.
