Real world I — insurance
Who shipped, who's quiet, who's dead — and what each teaches. Statuses as of August 2026; the full filterable list lives in the company tracker.
L1Alive and paying claims
Etherisc — the parametric protocol
liveWhat: open protocol on Ethereum/Gnosis for building parametric products; flagship flight-delay (FlightDelay) and crop covers. Numbers: 10,000+ policies across 15 countries since 2021; roughly $13 M in flight-delay payouts by 2025.
Teachable win: automatic payouts on landing — the customer experience conventional claims can't match. Survived where fizzy died by being embedded (partners integrate the protocol) rather than a destination site.
Arbol — climate risk, AI + chain
liveWhat: parametric weather/climate cover for farms and businesses; the first live in-production blockchain weather product using Chainlink oracles; dRe automates parametric reinsurance triggers. Now markets an AI-driven climate platform on the same rails.
Teachable win: attacked the whole stack — distribution, capital (non-insurance risk capital), data governance — with the contract as just one component. The M06 "10% of the product" thesis, proven positively.
Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition
live pilotWhat: drought cover for smallholder farmers in Kenya — ~7,000 covered — with payouts triggered by rainfall data. Stack: Avalanche (low fees), Chainlink (weather oracles), Hannover Re (risk capital), DAO structure for the coalition.
Teachable win: serves customers conventional insurance cannot reach economically (tiny premiums, no local claims infrastructure). Blockchain as cost-structure innovation, not buzzword.
Nexus Mutual — the crypto-native mutual
liveWhat: a discretionary mutual on Ethereum covering smart-contract hacks, custody failure and depeg events — members stake capital and vote claims. Effectively insurance for the on-chain economy, by it.
Teachable win: a genuinely new organisational form (tokenised mutual). Also a caution: "discretionary cover" ≠ regulated insurance — read the difference carefully.
Aon — stablecoin premium settlement
milestone · Mar 2026What: the first major global broker to settle insurance premiums in USD-backed stablecoins, for crypto-native clients Coinbase and Paxos.
Teachable win: the money leg, not the record leg — premiums moving on stablecoin rails (instant, 24/7, programmable) while policies stay conventional. Watch this pattern spread wherever clients already hold digital dollars (and study the rails in M09).
L2The working consortia & enterprise builds
| Initiative | What it does | Stack | Status · lesson |
|---|---|---|---|
| RiskStream Collaborative (The Institutes) | Largest industry consortium: first-notice-of-loss sharing, proof of insurance, mortality monitor | Canopy platform | active Non-profit, member-funded — sturdier economics than venture consortia |
| openIDL (AAIS, Travelers, Swiss Re…) | Regulatory data calls: insurers answer statistical reporting without shipping raw books | Hyperledger Fabric · Linux Foundation | active Regulator-facing reporting is a quietly perfect ledger fit |
| State Farm ↔ USAA | Auto subrogation netting (M05 case) | Permissioned chain | prod 2020 · quiet Shipped, worked, stopped being news — often what success looks like |
| Insurwave (Maersk, EY, Guardtime, MS Amlin, XL Catlin, WTW, ACORD) | Marine hull placement, premiums, real-time vessel data | Corda (launch, 2018) | evolved Went live for a real fleet; later evolved beyond DLT — platforms outlive their chains |
| ZhongAn · Ping An | China's insurtech giants: consortium chains for policy data, reinsurance, health records (OpenChain etc.) | Proprietary | active regionally Scale exists — in a different regulatory universe |
| MetLife LumenLab "Vitana" | Gestational-diabetes parametric, Singapore — auto-payout on diagnosis | Ethereum-based | pilot ended Clever trigger, no scale path — pilots need a business owner, not a lab |
L3The graveyard — and the autopsy that matters
B3i — the industry's flagship, 2016–2022
insolvent Jul 2022Rise: founded 2016 by the giants (Allianz, Swiss Re, Munich Re, Zurich, Aegon…); incorporated in Switzerland 2018; shipped a live property Cat XoL placement product on Corda; 20+ shareholders across insurance and reinsurance.
Death: July 2022 — a funding round failed to close, and B3i filed for insolvency with working software in production. No hack, no scandal: the members collectively declined to keep paying.
Autopsy: ① Consortium economics — value accrues to the market, invoices go to members; every budget cycle re-litigates existence. ② Slow multi-member governance vs startup burn rate. ③ Competing priorities (each giant had internal chain bets too). ④ After it fell, surveys showed 20%+ of executives calling blockchain "all hype" — a failed flagship taxes the whole field.
Use it: in any consortium pitch, ask the B3i question first — "who pays in year 4, and why is it in their P&L interest?" RiskStream's member-dues non-profit model and State Farm–USAA's bilateral self-interest are the two known answers.
AXA fizzy †
Flight-delay parametric on public Ethereum. Worked technically; died of distribution and demand (full case in M06 L5).
Vitana (MetLife) †
Parametric health pilot in Singapore. Ended quietly — a reminder that "successful pilot" and "product" are different species.
L4Market numbers — read with a flak jacket
A market "growing 53% CAGR to $194 B" whose flagship consortium died of a missed funding round deserves skepticism. Use forecasts to argue direction, never sizing; anchor decisions on the shipped cases above and the cost lines they actually moved (claims handling, reconciliation, fraud).
Assignment 8.1 · One-page case critique
assessmentPick one living initiative (Etherisc, Arbol, Lemonade CCC, RiskStream, openIDL) and write one page: the M05 framework verdict (three questions), the oracle/data governance answer, the funding model, its B3i-question answer, and the single metric you'd track to know it's still working. Keep it — it's capstone fuel.
Statuses as of Aug 2026. Sources: Ledger Insights (B3i insolvency), State Farm newsroom, Forbes (subrogation pilot), Etherisc/Lemonade/Arbol published figures, AAIS/openIDL, The Institutes, market reports (Mordor Intelligence, SNS Insider — forecasts). See resources for links.