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At the most basic level, insurance is something of a prediction market - you’re placing bets based on the likelihood of some future outcome. This makes it a great industry to integrate with blockchain. In an industry with so much fraud and inefficiency, companies need to be able to make decisions based on data they can trust, and blockchain can provide a very high level of security and transparency that would provide such trust. Accenture reports that 46 percent of insurers expect to integrate blockchain within 2 years. A blockchain solution would allow the insured party to log their claim and their evidence immutably on the chain and have it be validated by the network such that the insurer can take it as truth. Claims are a particularly dicey area of insurance - they take a long time to process and always involve two parties with asymmetric information that are at odds with one another. A robust blockchain solution to fix claims might involve the use of smart contracts that automatically dispense payments when a specific set of requirements for a claim are met. Aigang is exploring a solution like this - they are insuring smart devices and automatically processing claims by having the devices log their state on the blockchain. They currently support insurance for phone batteries, and are working on implementations for smart cars, smart homes, and drones. Additionally, a group of European insurers have come together to form the Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative (B3i), which intends to use blockchain to add security and transparency to current insurance services. Next, we’re going to look at how blockchain interacts with IoT.