Ethereum Focused Blockchain Hackathon Wants to Disrupt Insurance

How would you like a winner’s prize of £10,000 for hanging out with some ethereum and blockchain experts in a fancy London location in a two days event where coders go head to head?

If you know your block from your chain then it might not be a bad way to spend the weekend while your skills can be increased by joining London Ethereum Codeup beforehand, else this article is not for you.

See, even we can do it! But we won’t be coding. However, InsureTech is a slightly hot field right now because blockchain technology has a lot of potential in streamlining insurance claims and processes.

That’s why SimplyBusiness, “one of the UK’s biggest providers of business insurance,” as well as Accenture, the global giant which has a $32 billion yearly revenue, are sponsoring a hackathon called Break the Block.

Nick Johnson, the Core Developer from the Ethereum Foundation, will be judging, together with Thomas Bertani, founder of the smart contracts data feed Oraclize, and Will Knottenbelt, Director of the Imperial College Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering.

And if you’re still not convinced, there may be a treat because Makoto Inoue may be around too. He is a developer at Simply Business and runs the Ethereum Codeup.

That means he has plenty of ideas about how blockchain tech, especially ethereum’s smart contracts, can be applied to insurance, such as say for smart contracts bounties. The idea is simple.

You create a smart contract which allows all these blockchain projects to put up whatever bounty amount as insurance, then the smart contract combines all the bounties, giving it out to white hackers depending on the level of criticalness.

Ok, maybe it’s not that simple, but here’s another fancy one. Your smart contract connects to Road Traffic accident data keeping up with the latest developments and automatically pays your customer if he had an accident.

Sure genius, you can pull it off and go straight to the bank to grab that $1 billion everyone will just crave to give you. Because insurance is a big business, real big. A bit of a boring business, but not if you get to play with smart contracts, big data, algos, automation, and all the rest.

If you are into that stuff anyway. You might instead just want to enjoy the Italian beach during the 21^st to the 23^rd of July, but £10,000 could buy you a lot of that beach time.