Life insurance is the latest traditional financial product to receive crypto’s red-hot tokenization treatment.
Infineo, a company that focuses on blockchain-based life insurances, said Tuesday that it has transferred the “first-ever” tokenized life insurance policy on distributed ledger system. The firm minted a total of $9.4 million worth of policies using the Provenance network, according to a press release reviewed by CoinDesk.
The policies were tokenized with Provenance Blockchain Labs, the ecosystem development organization behind the Provenance network. Imineo said it is also developing secondary markets for tokenized policies that enable peer-to-peer transactions and new offerings backed by tokenized life insurances.
Infineo’s minting happened as traditional capital markets and crypto are becoming increasingly intertwined, with institutions placing old-school financial products like credit, bonds and private equity on blockchain networks in the form of tokens. The process is often referred to as tokenization of real-world assets (RWA), and a Bank of America report said it could transform and disrupt legacy financial systems. Participants hope that tokenization could create more efficient systems, speed up settlements and increase transparency.
“The digitization of life insurance policies not only unlocks global accessibility to life insurance, but also delivers efficiencies and cost savings for industry stakeholders at every point along the value chain,” infineo founder and CEO Cole Snell, said in a statement.
Infineo said the $3 trillion life insurance market could benefit from using blockchain rails, for example by protecting policy holders and beneficiaries from more than $7 billion worth of unclaimed benefits.
Provenance hosts more than $7 billion worth of active home equity lines of credit, rwa.xyz data shows, and has a $13 billion of total value locked (TVL) on the chain, according to Provenance’s website. It’s a Cosmos-based blockchain created in 2018 by fintech lender Figure.
