PolkaCover Community AMA — Recap
Aaron Barboza:
Hello PC Crew
Welcome to the first AMA happening on our chat channel.
We are excited to have Kunal Sadani, CEO — PolkaCover with us today.
@ksadani let’s start
Kunal Sadani: Hi All!
Aaron Barboza: Can you briefly introduce yourself as well as the PolkaCover?
Anthony Thomas: Hello Guys!!
Kunal Sadani:
Sure. Anthony & I have been based in Dubai (UAE) for over 15 years.
Previously I have worked with multinational insurance companies (AIG & Allianz) in a senior leadership role building products and partnerships in the Middle East and Africa Region. In my last role, I headed the Retail Insurance industry for Policybazaar (an insurance company valued at over $ 1 billion with VC partners like SoftBank & Tencent) reporting to the CEO.
My experience has revolved around developing, building, and managing large-scale B2C insurance products & markets for more than 11 years.
My co-founder Anthony has been with Allianz Partners for over 4 years and is part of the strategic development team where he works on building third-party implementations, automation engines. and workflow for insurance partners and third-party providers in B2B & B2C environments. Anthony has worked on creating back end solutions for these insurance products, and we have also worked together on several projects for Allianz before, where we met.
We both got involved in crypto about 3 years back and there has been no looking back. Our Tech Lead comes with several years of working in blockchain development and has worked with one of the largest banks in UAE in their DApp development with his last stint being with Marlin Protocol working on Polkadot deployments in short!
At PolkaCover, we are building a one-stop crypto-insurance & one-stop market for traditional and decentralized insurance products and services to provide crypto users in the marketplace. mass college an option to protect their Crypto, DeFi & NFT assets
Aaron Barboza: That’s a really impressive background :)
Aaron Barboza: Next Question: What’s your role at PolkaCover and what is the project about in a few simple sentences?
Kunal Sadani:
I’ll let Anthony answer this one
Anthony Thomas:
So Kunal looks after business development and partnerships to get to the desired platform, while I focus on the operational and the development side of the business.
we at Polkacover are building a one-stop crypto-insurance & one-stop market for traditional and decentralized insurance products and services to provide crypto users in the marketplace providing the mass market an option to protect their Crypto, DeFi & NFT assets.
Our products are targeted at early & retail crypto user base and providing covers against exchange hacks, Exchange bankruptcy, phishing attacks to name a few.
Aaron Barboza: That’s a detailed answer :)
Q3 coming up
Kunal Sadani:
and NFTS
Aaron Barboza: What products — coverages — are you offering?
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 token going bankrupt or project abandonment to start with
. Impermanent loss to NFT assets
plus we have loads of partners we are working with that are going be announced over this month.
Aaron Barboza: Sounds amazing. Next question
How many people are on the team? And For how long have you been working on PolkaCover?
Anthony Thomas:
Currently we are a growing team of 12 which includes 3 full time & 2 part time devs, this includes our technical and marketing team alongside me and Kunal, in addition we have also partnered with Audace Labs as our technology advisors who we consider as part of our team as well.
The Idea for Polkacover was penned out somewhere early 2020, and did a bit testing and market scoping for about a year. We had been speaking to insurance companies to warm them up to crypto insurance product for about a year and when we finally received a positive response is when we announced the project a couple of months ago
Aaron Barboza:
Incredible, that looks like a star-studded team behind an awesome product
It’s time for community questions, are you ready @ksadani @Anthony_T .
Shall we open the flood gates?
Kunal Sadani:
Let’s Go
Aaron Barboza: We have muted the Chat.
That’s a load of questions to answer
@ksadani
@Anthony_T
Choose a few of them.
Thank you.
Q: Can you please tell more about the insurance types that you support such as health insurance? Which types of insurances do you support?
Anthony Thomas:
We will start with Crypto products like exchange hacks; however we will be covering traditional covers like life, travel, home etc as well
Q: Insurance is something that people mostly do not put into first. How do you think insurance in crypto behavior will change?
Kunal Sadani:
Absolutely!
Insurance is the cornerstone to any mature market & asset class..
To be able to get mass adoption from the retail masses who have never dabbled into crypto, it is key to provide a safe gateway into experimenting and then leading to long term adoption in the space..
Take yourself back to your first few transactions of crypto and you would remember the fear of keeping your funds on CEX with the risk of losing it all
Q: While you build your project, do you take into account community feedbacks and demands?
Kunal Sadani:
Yes!
We initially are working as per our roadmap but are going to be taking on new products based on the community requirements and build on more crypto based offering as the platform matures.
Q: We have seen some massive hacks recently which if paid out on would result in a massive liquidity drain for PolkaCover. How will you ensure sufficient liquidity beyond that which you have in treasury? Will you cede to reinsurers?
Anthony Thomas: That is a great question, the answer to this is yes, we are already in discussions with major reinsurance partners where the products have been approved for the first stage signoff, all the products we will offer will be reinsured eventually.
Q: What separates you from other crypto insurance projects? Or makes you a better choice
Kunal Sadani: We hope all crypto insurance products succeed, however, one of the key takeaways is our core team comes from a strong insurance background who have delivered such platforms in the traditional world and have an deep understanding on underwriting insurance risk.
Marketing is also key but product development and risk assessment is what keeps you in business!
Q: How PolkaCover is going to go past the competitors that are coming up in the industry and generate revenue, and stand out among
Anthony Thomas: PolkaCover will be the first to insure products that have multiple layers of risk protection, for example governed risk pools and global re insurers, which no other competitor has done as yet, in addition the edge we have is underwriting experience brought in by the founders.
Q: How do you intend to differentiate from other Crypto Insurance providers? Evidently bringing in traditional insurance players is a big first step but I suspect others will do the same
Kunal Sadani: Same as above! However, bringing traditional insurers into crypto is a mammoth task for any platform! It has taken us almost a year of discussions (and personal connections) to be at a stage where we can shortly be able to announce our partners.
For any new platform, will be at least a year away before they are able to provide similar products!
Q: At this point, do you think you need CEX like binance to keep $CVR growing? Or is it better to focus on other activities than listing on Big CEX?
Kunal Sadani: We are focused on both!
However, onboarding a large CEX takes time as there is long due diligence requirement to be completed before we are able to onboard a CEX.
However, work around this is in play but it takes time to come to fruition
Q: Can you describe the nature of partnerships with the insurance providers? What role will they play if they sign up? What do the regulators say about this?
Anthony Thomas: interesting questions, you will have your answer in about two hours, when we announce who we are working with in order to provide regulated insurance products.
Q: From a marketing perspective how do you propose to increase awareness of the products offered?
Kunal Sadani: There are several marketing strategies in play and we also are in contact with several other marketing channels which are working with our project.
Marketing is key and you will see a lot more attention on the project in the short term
Q: Do you have any confirmed partnerships or exchanges that the token will enter?
Kunal Sadani: We have loads!
You would be hearing over 6 partnerships over the next 30 days …
On exchanges you know how it is….can’t say anything due to confidentiality
Q What are the biggest advantages of insurance based on blockchain over the traditional insurances?
Anthony Thomas: The biggest advantage of insurance product on blockchain is transparency to the community, we intend to create community driven insurance products that will reduce the cost of products and bring in transparency on the entire sales and claims process of the products.
Aaron Barboza:
Thank you @ksadani @Anthony_T for answering the questions
We’re going to have a quick second round of questions :)
Q: It’s quite unfortunate that many projects have infiltrated the market with just white papers without having any genuine use case. What are the main utilities of the PolkaCover?
Kunal Sadani: Well loads!
Whitepaper projects can succeed as long as they work towards their vision but the others will fail over time reducing the competition clearing the road for projects which are delivering. Although, I truly hope all insurance projects succeed and this space badly needs insurance based protocols because it is a massively uninsured!
We have a lot of use cases. I would recommend checking out the whitepaper as it details all of them in
Q: In a short space of time we have seen PolkaCover proving to be a valuable brand within the crypto space, opening avenues for insurance. Illegitimacy and scamming is rife in this space — all of us have either been a victim of illicit activity, or we know someone who has been a victim. My question is, with this space being so large, and ever-growing, what challenges do you think lie ahead in harnessing this market and reinforcing the faith with the wider community that PolkaCover is ultimately there for protection, helping to alleviate illicit activity and making it a healthier space?
Anthony Thomas: I couldn’t agree more, both Kunal and I were victims of such activities as well and that is what pushed us in to creating PolkaCover, and we know that we cannot bring in the trust and faith overnight, however we also know that the advanced crypto users are now more aware and less vulnerable. Hence we are creating products which are more inclined towards the early crypto users giving them the confidence to be in the crypto space and help it grow.
Q: How will eliminating Middleman reduce insurance prices, making it easier for most users to access them? What are the key points you have worked on to democratize this access for all?
Kunal Sadani: There are lot of cumbersome manual processes which add up the cost of distribution of between the Insurer & and the end user (Consultant/Broker/Management fees/Claims team/manual policy issuance etc.)
We are working towards creating an onchain process where all these “middleman” are eliminated making our running costs lean in comparison.
If we have lower running costs, the commission/incentives which are needed to run the platform also reduce significantly making our products more cheaper & efficient
Q So I was wondering about the partners and initial key investors. Are there any that you would like to expand upon?
Kunal Sadani: I would recommend going through our Medium page which lists out our early backers as well as partner thus far.
In a snapshot, we are working with NFT marketplaces, exchanges, Defi Lending platforms as well building our own insurance marketplace to distribute our products
Q: How will PolkaCover ensure the reliability of the data providers and will there be a governance mechanism to ensure they don’t collude with the system?
Anthony Thomas: We are working with leading data providers who we will announce in the coming months; in addition to that we have tied up with multiple providers to make sure that the data we are receiving is always correct.
The platform is aimed to be completely community driven and governed; there is an entire governance mechanism that we have stated in our whitepaper for all to read through
Q: Comparison with Bridge Mutual & Nexus Mutual, both are offering crypto insurance, what strengths do PolkaCover have over them?
Kunal Sadani: Bridge Mutual & Nexus mutual are both great projects
We actually do not directly compete with them but are in the same insurance space. We actually would be a partner with these platforms in the longer run.
Without going into detail, both projects are building their projects and managing the risk within its ecosystem setup.
We are building a marketplace of products which are backed by traditional & decentralized insurers to choose from so we would be working towards onboarding all decentralized insurance protocols once their products are ready for market as well.
Separately, we would be also introducing an Insurance DAO model at a later stage which would target NFT marketplaces to start and would aim at creating products which are not available in the crypto ecosystem.
Q: Have you done your project code audit yet- if not, when u r gonna release your audit report??
Anthony Thomas: Our Smart contract code has already been audited by Hacken, the report has been shared with the community through our medium:https://polkacover.medium.com/leading-cryptosecurity-firm-hacken-audits-polkacover-575c6cb6c79f
Our product code is still under development and will be audited once it is completed, we will be sharing the updates with the community soon on that as well.
Aaron Barboza:
Thank you guys for the wonderful answers!
See you next week for another community AMA session.
Need More Info on Polkacover?
Polkacover social media links:
Telegram: https://t.me/polkacover
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Polkacover
Medium:https://polkacover.medium.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/polkacover
Website: https://www.polkacover.com/
Whitepaper: https://www.polkacover.com/pdf/Whitepaper.pdf
GitBook: https://polkacover.gitbook.io/
