Suinsure: Decentralised Parametric Insurance

Suinsure explores how blockchain can support a concrete social goal: financial inclusion for people who are excluded from conventional insurance and banking. We built a parametric-insurance proof of concept around the idea that a policyholder should be able to obtain cover and receive a payout without depending on a traditional bank account or a slow, opaque claims process.

That matters in places exposed to climate risk, where delayed support can be as damaging as the event itself. Julius, a farmer in Malawi cited in our research from a recent Guardian article, is an example of the kind of person who could benefit from fast, transparent drought insurance.

The central technical problem is connecting a real-world event to an on-chain contract. A drought cannot be verified by the blockchain alone, so we designed a hybrid Oracle architecture: AWS hardware enclaves help certify the integrity of weather data, while Sui Move translates policy conditions into an immutable smart contract.

We kept this complexity out of the user journey. A user can subscribe to a policy in seconds through zkLogin, receive an NFT representing a traceable policy, and avoid the need for a conventional bank account. When the Oracle validates a claim, the treasury—placed in DeFi protocols to generate yield—can trigger an immediate payout.

Suinsure demonstrates that the technical pieces for instant, trust-minimised parametric insurance can work together. But a proof of concept is only a first step: legal integration and systemic reinsurance are still essential to absorb large-scale climate risk responsibly.