In cryptonetworks we see no centralised owner, taking all the rent and abusing its monopolistic position. The rent is distributed among nodes, supporting the protocol and firming up a service in a network.
IBISA (https://www.ibisa.network/) is just that. Today, risk sharing uses the model of insurance, where someone (the insurer) centralises all the risks and takes care of the problems of the “free rider” and of insincere claims. It’s scalable, but has intrinsically high costs of operations. It works well to insure clipper ship cargos of high value and infrequent damages (it was invented for that). It doesn’t scale down well to insure small crops of low value and frequent damages.
When a smallholder farmer can pay only 10–20 USD per year of premium the intrinsic operating costs of formal insurance is simply too high and insurance doesn’t bring value for money. That’s why penetration rate of crop micro-insurance is less than 0.5% worldwide despite heavy subsidies. Still, there are 500+M of families worldwide just waiting for a solution.
IBISA models the ancestral mutualism using the blockchain. In mutuality, there is no central risk taker: everything is peer-topeer. It is decentralised by necessity, so that the costs of operations are split between all stakeholders. With it the IBISA cryptonetwork can be viable while consuming only 20% of costs (4 USD per PER farmer). Do you know what means 4 USD per year? Do you know how much you pay your Internet access per year? 4 USD per year to pay all stakeholders is a VERY STRONG constraint. Without the blockchain and its built-in trust machine, IBISA would not be possible using classical IT.
Once IBISA is successful and can protect the revenues risks of smallholder farmers, these persons can start thinking of the future and about protecting their tools, their properties, their prices, their health, their persons, their education. This will open a huge (500+M families) market. But first things first: we have to help them mutually protect their crop yields, which current formal insurance can’t.
IBISA is supported by the European Space Agency and the Luxembourg Ministry of Cooperation. We won the KPMG prize of “Financial Inclusion” in 2018. We are starting to deploy in India and in Niger, this February 2019. More countries are in the waiting list. Follow us on https://www.linkedin.com/company/ibisa-network/