There’s a variety of interesting projects going on in the crypto space today, so much so that it can be easy to overlook some of the more compelling ones that might have more staying power.
Let’s take a look at Nexus Mutual and understand why this particular project may have staying power within the cryptocurrency industry.
We will take a look at Nexus Mutual and dig into why it may matter.
We start with the premise that great products are customer centric and help to improve the experience of the end user in some form or fashion.
A company like Amazon wins and is loved by the customer because it understands what the customer wants and strives to meet the needs of the customer each day in a better fashion. As such, we want to see how Nexus Mutual is changing things for the better.
The Field of Insurance
Nexus Mutual seeks to tackle an age-old industry, the industry of insurance. An industry that states to propose a bet, the bet being that calamity will likely not happen, and where the consumer states that trouble is certain to befall them. The insurance companies seem to be winning the bet. Large companies such as State Farm have written more than $40 billion in insurance premiums and capture more than 15% of market share. Its net income was $2.2 billion in 2017.
Insurance, like Warren Buffet, and other large investors know, is a profitable business.
But insurance wasn’t always like this.
It was a tad bit different.
According to Nexus Mutual, in the days of yore, “communities would pool resources together to protect individuals from risks they all faced”. In addition, the Nexus Mutual site video explainer states that diversification works better when more people are in the pool.
The decentralized project aims to bring insurance back into the hands of the community.
The blockchain will allow for proper governance, transparency, and disintermediation to bring value back to all stakeholders within the Nexus Mutual community.
The decentralized project, founded by Hugh Karp, is built on Ethereum.
Community Driven
Decisions for claims will be made by the community members. Decisions are “recorded and enforced by smart contracts”. All members must possess NXM tokens to have access to membership rights, to purchase cover, to participate in other activities of the Nexus Mutual community.
Legal Backing
Even though the project is community driven, it is one that states to have legal backing.
The First Segment
The decentralized project will start by offering a smart contract cover solution that will be allocated to “secure risk and potential bugs in smart contract code”.
To Start Your Nexus Mutual Journey
Interested members will need to have a Metmask account and sign up to be part of the community. According to my understanding, members would have to contribute ETH into the liquidity pool, in exchange for NXM.
Nexus Mutual Staying Power
The problem that it tackles is a pressing one, especially in the cryptocurrency industry, where an insurance program would be of great value. As such, Nexus Mutual checks out on the usefulness front.
The project will have staying power if it is able to create and enforce a proper token model. The proposed model, on first glance, does seem viable, as its tokens are a key part of the system and represent real utility within the Nexus Mutual paradigm.
Nexus Mutual still must be tested on a larger scale and must show that it is legally viable across the world.
Progress
At the time of this writing, the project has conducted partnerships with projects such as Ethersic and have signed up at least 57 members.