Leveraging on the blockchain technology, Glass Cube Ltd, through their I-CHAIN platform plans to eliminate the hassle surrounding the insurance industry by creating a conducive environment for launching insurance products, optimising sign-up processes and moderating business risks.
The blockchain technology is bringing its essential features like transparency, security, immutability and integrity, thereby creating an entirely new shift within the insurance industry.
Among the early birds to apply this new technology to the industry, I-CHAIN is positioning itself to build an ecosystem that will enable insurers build, publish and sell insurance products to customers as well as handle communication channels and insurance processes such as sales and claim processing. The I-CHAIN ecosystem is one that allows participants to benefit from the platform via issuance off the utility token – ICHN and the security token – ICHNS.
What is Blockchain?
Blockchain is a permission-less, immutable, trusted data structure that enables the creation of a digital ledger of transactions and the ability to share them among a distributed network of computers.
Problems confronting traditional insurance industries
From complexities in contractual clauses to regulatory issues and fraudulent activities, the regular insurance industry is facing its share of challenges. In the case of accidents, customers can be faced with complex claim processes. They also have to deal with the complexity in contract clauses as a result of the legal terms used.
On the part of the insurer, there are now tighter regulations and fraud attempts from individuals for small claims or more organised attempts.
Blockchain, with its immense potential, has the capacity to bring a competitive advantage to the insurance industry.
Benefits of I-CHAIN
Still at its early stage, the insurance industry is still contemplating on how to maximise the advantages of the blockchain technology considering its potential. There are a lot of positive implications of blockchain as regards the insurance industry. There are some detailed I-CHAIN platform proposes below.
- Decentralised Structure: The insurance industry is highly regulated. This however does not bring any tangible benefits to customers like reduction in cost or improvement of customer experience. It rather gives the government control over insurance companies. The decentralised structure proposed by the I-CHAIN ecosystem will implement blockchain solutions in order to resolve scalability, expertise and regulation issues.
–Scalability: Only when required will a blockchain layer be assigned to a portion of data. This solves issues of scalability.
–Expertise: Blockchain expertise is not a requirement for insurers as they will not need to build solutions from the scratch. This will shorten marketing time as well as reduce cost for insurance companies.
–Regulatory issues: Adopting a common platform ensures that all regulatory issues are resolved since the platform looks out for the interest of all participants.
- Unique digital identity management with audit trails and transparency: Identity verification and authentication will be purely digital as the blockchain provides a transparent public ledger to enable this.
- Through the platform, insurers can compete for customers while offering a range of products and prices. The blockchain offers in general a better user experience for the customers.
- The open-sourced platform will be provided for free and will create opportunities for new players to enter into the insurance market.
- Single point of truth: The blockchain – an “unhackable” network – because of its reliability and durability can be used as a single point of truth.
- 24/7 accessibility/availability – data can be transferred at great speed through the system 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
- Reduction in cost – because the platform is controlled by a secure and transparent technology, costs and intermediaries are reduced to a minimum.
- The platform will create new jobs as well as fairness and affordability of insurance products for the global market.
- I-CHAIN stores customer information and claims on the blockchain. This makes it harder for fraudsters to hide their identities, make fraudulent purchases or double claiming.
Smart Contracts
A smart contract is a computer protocol that digitally facilitates the performance or negotiation of a contract. Computable agreements or transactions can be reached without third parties or intermediaries using smart contracts.
Smart contract, digitally written using programming code languages are trackable and irreversible. Similar to a traditional contract, smart contracts establish contractual clauses that can be automatically executed by a distributed ledger system.
Powered by the blockchain technology, smart contracts enable insurers and customers to manage claims in a transparent and trusted manner.
On the I-CHAIN platform, smart contract would enforce automatic payment of valid claims and contracts that are recorded and validated on the blockchain.
Smart contracts vs traditional contracts
- The services of a lawyer are usually unnecessary using smart contracts unlike when preparing a traditional contract.
- While a third party is needed in a traditional contract, this is not so when using smart contract as it can be included in the code.
- It could take days to set up a traditional contract while smart contracts could be prepared in minutes.
- Unlike the regular contract where remittance is manual, smart contracts enable automated remittance.
Advantages of participating in I-CHAIN ICO
In a recent interview with “techbullion”, Vasili Rybakov, the Head of Glass Cube Ltd outlined some of the benefits of partaking in the ongoing ICO.
For instance, as the platform develops and breaks into the insurance market, the Utility token will rise in value as only Utility tokens will allow you to build and sell products on the I-CHAIN platform. Its value can increase by up to 10% of the start-up costs for license and software (for 1000 customers) of “traditional” insurance companies.
Furthermore, investors who purchase Utility token before 31.10.2018 will receive equal amount of Security tokens. That is to say, 10 Utility token=10 Security tokens. As a source of permanent income, Security token owners will also be able to receive dividends from the platform revenue.
About shutting down, he insists that there are no risks of such happening as they have a strategic investor in Pavel Pribylov. “Our ICO is one of the least risky, but at the same time the earning capacity is pretty high”, he said.
I-CHAIN will launch their first real product in Q4 2018. For more information, see their whitepaper https://i-chain.net/i-chain.net.wpaper_rev_005.pdf
