Etherisc

About Etherisc

Etherisc is a decentralized insurance protocol leveraging blockchain technology to enhance the efficiency, transparency, and accessibility of insurance. The company was founded in July 2016 by Christoph Mussenbrock and Stephan Karpischek, who met to discuss the potential of insurance on the blockchain. Their collaboration quickly led to the development of their first product, the Flight Delay DApp, which was presented in September 2016 and marked the first insurance product live on a public blockchain.

The founders brought together diverse and relevant expertise. Stephan Karpischek, who holds a PhD in Information Management, has over two decades of experience in IT and consulting, including a role as a business analyst for blockchain innovation at UBS. Christoph Mussenbrock has a background in mathematics and a long career in Germany's cooperative banking sector and as CEO of a risk management solutions company, providing deep experience with regulatory frameworks. They were later joined by co-founder Renat Khasanshyn, an insurance industry veteran who started his career as a software engineer for a regulated insurance intermediary in 2001 and is also the founder of Altoros.

Etherisc operates on a decentralized business model, providing an open-source platform—the Generic Insurance Framework (GIF)—that allows developers, insurtech startups, established insurers, and NGOs to build and deploy their own parametric insurance products. This model reduces operational costs and dependence on traditional intermediaries. Revenue is generated through several streams, including platform fees for services, staking mechanisms involving their native DIP token, and returns from investments in risk pools. Participants can stake DIP tokens to invest in risk pools, participate in governance, and earn returns, creating a profit-sharing model within the ecosystem.

The company offers a platform for a wide range of parametric insurance products, where payouts are automatically triggered by verifiable, predefined events rather than a manual claims assessment process. Products developed on the platform include flight and train delay protection, crop protection based on weather data, hurricane protection, and USDC depeg protection. Etherisc has facilitated notable real-world applications, such as providing crop insurance to over 17,000 smallholder farmers in Kenya in collaboration with partners like ACRE Africa and Chainlink, and launching hurricane insurance in Puerto Rico. These initiatives demonstrate the platform's capacity to offer affordable coverage in underserved markets by significantly reducing administrative costs.