The problem GenZ Insurance solves

Agriculture is the lifeline of Indian economy which contributes to 22% of the GDP, provides 58% employment, and sustains 69% of the population. However, agricultural production comes with various risk factors beyond human control. Farmers are highly exposed to risk and it is aggravated by the limited span of risk mitigation instruments such as insurance where there is a lack of participation from the private sector and the claim payout procedure is very lengthy, due to which the farmer cannot initiate new cropping activity or it is delayed.

There is no proper and adequate provision of security for crops grown by Indian farmers and despite increasing vulnerability, they have not yet fully developed the capacity to mitigate risk effectively. There is a need to design innovative insurance products to balance the interests of the insurer as well as the insured.

With the Prime Minister’s call to be “self sufficient” or “aatmanirbhar”, we present a decentralised peer-to-peer crop insurance framework which enables to overcome the current disadvantages by securing farmers’ interests, eliminating intermediaries and providing a secure, standardized, and transparent system that does not hinder any information from stakeholders. Through blockchain technology, the system promotes trust in a trust less environment wherein the farmers and the private investors go into a contract. The investors pool their investments and provide cover for the farmers, thus help the nation become self sufficient and help the farmers prosper.

Challenges we ran into

A major challenge is to connect external data to the existing blockchain in a language that they both understand. There arises a need for middleware that translates data from the outside world to the smart contracts existing on the blockchain. However, using a single centralised source of data is a victim of a crucial weakness and defeats the very purpose of a decentralised system. In case of failure of the data node (oracle), the system would be effectively compromised.

We overcome this challenge by using Chainlink. Chainlink is a decentralised oracle network. We built our own custom external adapter, which is an API wrapped around with another API and the our Chainlink node is currently up and running from Paris!

Chainlink provides a decentralised network of nodes that provide information from off blockchain sources. Each node in the chain link extracts data from different sources and provides it to the smart contract. Of all the results obtained only the most common answer is accepted as true and thus validation of the API also takes place due to the decentralised nature of Chainlink. This weather data provided is then used by the smart contract to determine whom the amount has to be transferred.