Christopher McDaniel is the President at the Institutes’ RiskStream Collaborative. In this podcast he announces the launch of Canopy 3.0 their latest version of their insurance blockchain platform. This new platform, built on Kaleido, supports Corda, Enterprise Ethereum and Hyperledger. Chris also shares with us his plans to launch first notice of loss in production mode on Canopy 3.0 this year.

 
What is blockchain?
Since the launch of Canopy 1.0 in late 2017, Chris' view of blockchain has evolved. Back then when they were building Canopy 1.0 their views were that blockchain was fundamentally a sharing mechanism. There weren’t many applications out there so they had to build use cases and applications to demonstrate to the market what is possible.

Now with the launch of Canopy 3.0 things have changed. GDPR, and the right to be forgotten, has had some impact on what you can and can’t do on a blockchain. There are now many parties building out solutions on blockchain compared to back in 2017. Whilst blockchain is still a sharing mechanism there is this realisation that you don’t need to put everything on the blockchain. You can store data off chain and link it to the blockchain via a validated hash. For Chris, blockchain is a great solution for verification, for trust and for facilitating sharing.

 
The Institute and RiskStream Collaborative
The Institute, parent company of RiskStream Collaborative, is focused on education and certification in the insurance industry. Their flagship certification is the CPCU certification amongst another 20 certifications.

Their reason for starting RiskStream Collaborative, is that the management at the Institute realised that emerging technologies such as blockchain, AI (artificial intelligence) and IoT (internet of things) are going to be key things they will need to teach and certify for insurance professionals in the future. Based on that they created RiskStream.

 
Canopy 1.0
Prior to creating Canopy 1.0 the Institute organised a working group for 30 insurers who wanted to find out more about blockchain. From that event three to four proof of concepts (PoCs) were set up on a public Ethereum blockchain. Some of the learnings they gained from that event was the need to build on a private blockchain. Canopy 1.0 was launched on a private Ethereum blockchain with proof of insurance as the one use case built on top of it.

 
Canopy 2.0
One of the key learnings that the team took out of Canopy 1.0 is that members of RiskStream Collaborative weren’t comfortable with the classic version of blockchain where everything is shared with everyone on the network. Whilst the information was encrypted and accessed on a permissioned basis it still had  trust issues along with legal and compliance ones as it was shared with everyone.

Chris and his team looked for an alternative solution and identified R3’s Corda as it had a point to point approach instead of everything being shared across the blockchain. This was a critical success factor for the consortium’s members. Purist would argue that Corda isn’t a blockchain but a distributed ledger technology (DLT). Whilst this is true from a technical standpoint, the DLT solution provided the answers to the challenges they were facing.