Hashgraph, the entity spearheading the Hedera network’s development, has entered into a partnership with The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative. This collaboration aims to establish an interoperable property risk and resilience portal tailored for the insurance industry’s largest emerging technology consortium.
The forthcoming solution seeks to revolutionize the sharing, verification, and utilization of property risk data across both commercial and residential sectors within the insurance industry. By creating a singular, reliable source for property and risk data, the portal intends to assist insurers, brokers, and reinsurers in minimizing fragmentation, enhancing data accuracy, and streamlining the underwriting process significantly.
Addressing a Trillion-Dollar Data Challenge
As reported by S&P Global, the property and casualty insurance market in the United States has surpassed $1 trillion in direct annual premiums. This substantial figure encompasses approximately $169 billion in homeowner premiums and $103 billion in commercial property premiums.
Despite the immense scale of risks underwritten by the industry, insurers continue to grapple with multiple challenges, including:
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A heavy dependence on a fragmented array of manual forms, outdated systems, and external data sources.
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Inconsistent data quality coupled with operational inefficiencies that adversely impact the accuracy of underwriting and pricing.
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Escalating risks, particularly from natural disasters, which are adding complexity and volatility to the risk landscape.
Pat Schmid, president of The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative, pointed out the existing inefficiencies in current workflows. He remarked, “The data gathering and sharing process for insurance placement and underwriting is arduous, highly manual, and inefficient.” He noted that numerous stakeholders—including carriers, brokers, reinsurers, and data providers—often duplicate efforts without a standardized method for verifying or maintaining vital data over time.
Schmid emphasized the aim of the partnership is to tokenize risk assets, establishing a persistent, unique identifier to serve as a unified data foundation for the industry. “Property provides an ideal starting point,” he stated.
A Hybrid Distributed Ledger Framework
To develop this shared foundation, RiskStream plans to utilize a hybrid distributed ledger model. This framework combines HashSphere—Hashgraph’s private, permissioned ledger—with the Hedera public network.
This hybrid architecture facilitates the secure management of sensitive data within a private context while anchoring essential records to a public ledger via tokenization. The result is enhanced tracking of risks as well as improved trust and interoperability concerning the underlying assets, all while maintaining data privacy. Additionally, RiskStream is implementing an EVM-based real-world asset (RWA) strategy, which will enable more adaptable financial and data models through the integration of smart contracts.
Kurt Bierbower, chief revenue officer at Hashgraph, highlighted the practical benefits of this technological structure. He explained, “HashSphere was created to eliminate the barriers that have traditionally obstructed the adoption of public blockchain solutions by regulated sectors. This partnership illustrates how hybrid models can facilitate scalable real-world applications. By tokenizing property and risk data, we’re establishing a trustworthy foundation that accelerates the underwriting process and modernizes risk evaluation.”
While the initial focus of the partnership is on the tokenization of commercial and residential properties, both organizations intend to broaden their data tokenization initiatives to encompass additional insurance lines and operational processes in the future.