AMA RECAP — AMA Room x PolkaCover

Below is a quick recap for those who missed out on the informative AMA session with Kunal Sadani, CEO of PolkaCover, and AMA Room.

Kunal Sadani:

Hi Guys ! Glad to be here !

Host:

So Welcome the AMA Room

Kunal Sadani:

Thank you for inviting me !

Host:

How are you today? Where you at right now by the way?

Kunal Sadani:

Doing well ! I am right now at our office in Dubai .. The business team is based in Dubai and our tech team runs out of India ..

Host:

Nice. So tell us what is PolkaCover?

Kunal Sadani:

So… In a snapshot … Polkacover is the first DeFi insurance marketplace for the global crypto ecosystem. We would be providing Crypto ( and other lines as well) insurance products which are backed by traditional & Decentralized insurance providers ..

Polkacover will connect users and multinational insurance providers with all global insurance products such as crypto-related protection, health, life, education, and family insurance plans.

The platform will include a frictionless insurance marketplace experience that incorporates next generation blockchain technology and tokenized incentives.

Host:

And as i understand, YOU are uniquely suited to this cuz of your background. Please tell us more about you and your past work

Kunal Sadani:

Sure .. Anthony & I have been based in Dubai (UAE) for over 15+ years.

I have previously worked with multinational insurance companies (AIG & Allianz) in senior leadership roles building products & partnerships in the Middle East & Africa Region.

In my last role, I was heading the Retail Insurance vertical for Policybazaar ( which is an insurtech valued at over $1billion with VC partners like SoftBank & Tencent) reporting into the CEO. My experience has revolved developing, building & managing large scale B2C insurance products & markets for over 10 years from scratch..

Anthony was working with Allianz Partners (Big 4 German MNC Insurer) for over 4 years and was part of a strategic development team where he worked in building third party implementations, automation engines & workflows for insurance partners & third party vendors in a B2B & B2C environment. Anthony has been working in creating back end solutions for these insurance products and we have previously worked together as well on several projects for Allianz which is where we had met.

Host:

Very great fitting founders i must say.

Kunal Sadani:

Thanks .. it was out mutual love for crypto which got PolkaCover started

Host:

So what kind of insurance are you focusing on in the early days?

Kunal Sadani:

As we have several products in the pipeline, our initial focus is bring out products targeted at crypto currency users which is backed/underwritten by large traditional insurance companies. In the medium term, we are also building out our own P2P Insurance platform ( Insurance DAO ) where we would have additional products in there as well ..

A few of the initial products we are working on are

→ Loss of crypto due to exchange hack

→ Loss of crypto due to phishing attack

→ Loss of crypto due to wallet hack

- Loss of crypto due token going bankrupt or project abandonment

to start with …

We are also looking at NFT Assets by Impermanent Loss through our Insurance DAO

Host:

Interesting. So what does the token do?

Kunal Sadani:

Well the token has several use cases through our ecosystem

In a snapshot..

With the Traditional Insurance marketplace

- Policy purchase

- Policy Discounts ( When staking our token )

- Staking rewards

- Claim payouts

- Rewards/Incentive programs for the community

- Rewards for quick SLA for the insurers to process out claims

In the P2P Insurance platform

- Governance rights

- Claim Assessment rights

- Liquidity & risk assessment rewards

Although you would find a lot more detail in our whitepapper which you give the detailed depth of the use cases ..

We are also releasing v2.0 of our whitepaper next week which will give a lot more insight into the token ecosystem in the P2P platform as well

Host:

So how do you guys handle claims in a decentralized way?

Kunal Sadani:

So .. there are 2 kind of products which are available for users …

In the decentralized claims management options for traditional insurers

For high cost claim amounts, the insurer would need to review the claim offline.

- For low cost claim amounts, the payout would be run through a smart contract.

- The claimant would raise a claim request through the platform

- Depending on the type of product / claim scenario, a set of predefined questions & documents are requested.

- Once the document/questions have been fulfilled by the claimant, through the smart contract, a direct payout is made to the claimant into their address which can paid out is CVR/DAI/USDT

A similar functionality will be built into the P2P platform as well and as we gather more claim data , the payout allowance through this method would increase over time

Host:

Nice.

Everyone get ready to post their questions about Polkacover.

Kunal Sadani:

We would launching claim payouts in phases to ensure the due diligence is done by our part before increasing limits access the board

Host:

Do you have any plans to attract non-crypto investors to POLKACOVER Because it is the success of a project to get more investors who are still not in the crypto world specially as a new project entering to crypto. What are the plans to increase awareness about POLKACOVER around in non-crypto space?

Kunal Sadani:

Yes.. Initially, our focus would be at the “early/mass” crypto users to provide them a safe environment for them to enter & transact in crypto. The crypto insurance market is earmarked to be valued a $40 billion industry which still remains untapped.

We do have a large marketing budget that is planned to be used once we launch where we be using traditional & crypto marketing providers to do an outreach to build adoption of the platform

Host:

How are the operational and administrative costs of insurance policies and their coverage determined, and do Polkacover, insurance products differ institutionally and individually?

Kunal Sadani:

Our products are only aimed for the retail users and being built in the same fashion.

We believe retail crypto user do not have any real insurance options and are at high risk & mercy of exchanges in case something goes wrong and we want to cater to mass market users. On every policy sold, a small portion of it goes towards managing the operations costs & future growth of the platform.

Host:

what are the ways that Polkacover generates profits/revenue to maintain your project and what is its revenue model ? How can it make benefit win-win to both invester and your project ?

Kunal Sadani:

On every traditional policy sold, Polkacover receives a distribution incentive from the insurance provider.

On the P2P model, we receives an operational fee from the policy premium to manage the platform.

With this model, we are not dependent on “using” the tokens in our treasury but business itself takes cares of the operations & expansion of the platform

Host:

A lot of people will want to know what the strength of POLKACOVER is but I want to know the weaknesses and problems POLKACOVER faces ? How do you plan to solve it?

Kunal Sadani:

Great Question !

I think it is key to always be aware of your weaknesses. We have made it a point to build a team which has necessary background & expertise to build such a platform. I have already done this in the traditional sense in my previous role. So it’s a lot more of execution instead of experimentation for our team.

That being said, one of the greatest hurdles we faced was getting traditional insurers “interested” in providing crypto-insurance which has taken almost a year of work behind the scenes ..

With that out of way, its onwards & upwards !!

Host:

Crypto Insurance products, as they are a new vertical, are a heavily regulated industry globally. How will you get around this, and in which jurisdiction(s) will you focus on?

Kunal Sadani:

For crypto insurance product from traditional insurers, the initial access will be available to about 120 countries. We would know the exact number of countries once we get the final sign off from our 2 insurance partners on our crypto products.

We have received the “in principle” approval from the partners and are awaiting the final signoff from the head offices as these are new product verticals and would need an additional layer of internal approvals from the partners to be able to proceed.

Unfortunately, until the product is signed off, we cannot share the information of the insurance partners.

In terms of jurisdiction, although our Business team is based in Dubai ( and the tech team is based in India), the marketplace platform will be incorporated out of BVI to allow us(and the insurers) to be able distribute these policies to a global audience as Dubai does not allow such flexibility to distribute insurance products globally.

Most of the western countries ( barring US/Canada) will be available to purchase in the initial launch. As US/Canada is heavily regulated markets, we would look at adding them on at a later stage once we receive approval from the insurers & our legal advisors.

Host:

Polkacover is a complex project. Are you planning to create educational materials so that more people understand your goals and vision?

Kunal Sadani:

Yes. As we release the platform, One of the main differences between us an other insurance protocols is having a user-friendly easy to use platform.

There would be a lot educational materials around how to transact safely within crypto and importance of insurance in this ecosystem .

Host:

Do you have some plans in providing institutional level insurance on top of the user level insurances? Maybe exchanges as well in the future?

Kunal Sadani:

We have discussions around doing institutional level coverages as well but the focus for the first year is provide services to retail users .

Host:

Insurance in Crypto is much harder than Insurance in Real Life because Crypto is Anonymous, Decentralized so what is your solution to solve this problems?

Kunal Sadani:

For this reason, we are building both options in our platform. Traditional Insurers ( Require KYC ) & P2P Platform ( No KYC) allowing users to be comfortable in whichever mode they want to proceed in purchasing their coverages

Host:

P2P insurances are already quite well adopted on the market, even outside of blockchain. Are you doing things somehow differently — how does this benefit your clients?

Kunal Sadani:

One of the major differences is the products we would offer are focused & geared around crypto users which is not available elsewhere.

We find it is key for crypto users to have products in this community and are looking to lead the change that is needed for such solutions

Host:

Each project has interesting stories before it is created. So can you tell people about the story that gave you the motivation to build and develop a great project like yours?

Kunal Sadani:

Well… This came out of personal need.

When I (and most of us) entered crypto, I was scared to transact or leave my assets on exchanges on a “trust” basis …

The brave ones did it, the other’s just did not buy crypto they were scared to..

Being from the insurance world, we saw a massive problem & opportunity to build out solutions to cater to the mass market and that is where the journey started to created the polkacover platform.

We wanted to use our experience & passion into building something which can benefit everyone in crypto

Host:

What is the end goal for Polkacover — do you want to compete with the giants like Allianz? Or be a bridge between insurance and cryptocurrencies with coverage provided for crypto?

Kunal Sadani:

Well … We would not compete with them but instead would onboard them as partner’s onto our insurance marketplace.

We would work as a distribution partner for their traditional & Decentralized insurance provider & would also seperately create insurance products where we see a need but do not have a insurer to provide us a coverage in our P2P platform ( i.e. NFT’s)

Host:

Thats all the time we have!

Kunal please invite everyone to where they can follow Polkacover

Kunal Sadani:

Thanks for having me and loved the questions, the community really has understood the project well and loved the support

Please do follow us on our social media pages … We have a lot off announcements lined up

Follow us on our channels to be updated on all our developments:

Twitter: @Polkacover

Medium: PolkaCover.com

Telegram: https://t.me/polkacover

Website: https://www.polkacover.com

Namaste !