The Institutional Case for Decentralized Insurance

For decades, the global insurance industry has been defined by scale, capital intensity, and complexity. At more than $8 trillion in annual premiums, it is one of the largest financial markets in the world and one of the least structurally changed. The core model remains largely intact, centered on centralized carriers, heavy regulatory overhead, slow product cycles, and underwriting decisions constrained by manual processes and legacy cost structures.

Decentralized insurance changes that equation entirely.

At DEIN, we believe the next era of insurance will not be defined by larger balance sheets or more aggressive distribution, but by radically lower friction, programmable capital, and peer-to-peer risk markets that can be created, priced, and capitalized in minutes instead of years.

Why the Traditional Model Leaves Value on the Table

Traditional insurance works, but it is inefficient by design.

Launching or expanding an insurance product today requires licensing, regulatory approvals, actuarial reviews, distribution partnerships, and significant marketing spend before a single dollar of premium is written. Even when demand exists, the cost of serving niche or emerging markets often outweighs the potential return. As a result, entire categories of risk remain underinsured or not insured at all, a gap that global institutions like the World Economic Forum have repeatedly highlighted in their analysis of protection gaps across economies.

From an underwriting perspective, capital is locked behind layers of overhead. Profitability depends not only on risk selection but on maintaining large administrative organizations to support compliance, distribution, and claims infrastructure. That overhead ultimately shows up as higher premiums for policyholders and lower capital efficiency for underwriters.

The outcome is a market that is enormous in size, but structurally constrained in how and where it can grow.

Decentralization as a Structural Unlock

Decentralized insurance replaces centralized decision-making with open, market-driven underwriting.

At its core, DEIN enables insurance to operate peer-to-peer. Instead of a single carrier deciding whether a market is worth serving, any participant can assess a risk, determine whether it is mathematically profitable, and deploy capital into an underwriting pool. If the pricing is attractive, policy buyers participate. If it is not, the market corrects itself.

What disappears is the friction.

There is no manual licensing process required to test demand, no multi-year product development cycle, no centralized distribution stack, and no structural bias against niche or long tail markets.

A market that might take years to justify inside a traditional carrier can be evaluated, capitalized, and live in minutes.

That is not just efficiency. It is market creation.

Creating Insurance Markets That Never Existed

One of the most powerful implications of decentralized insurance is its ability to surface entirely new markets.

In the traditional system, underwriting highly specific risk, whether for small professional groups, emerging digital businesses, or novel asset classes, is often economically irrational. The addressable market may be real, but the operational cost of serving it is prohibitive. McKinsey has noted that the economics of insurance are increasingly strained by rising costs and complexity, particularly outside of large standardized markets.

In a decentralized model, that constraint vanishes.

If a market exists and can be priced profitably, someone can underwrite it. Capital is deployed directly against risk, without the burden of centralized infrastructure. The result is a long tail of insurance products that simply could not exist before, each one independently assessed, capitalized, and priced by market participants.

This is where the total addressable market for decentralized insurance begins to expand beyond replacement and into net new growth.

A Better Equation for Underwriters and Policyholders

Lower friction produces a fundamentally better economic equation.

For underwriters, decentralized pools mean higher capital efficiency, transparent on-chain performance data, direct exposure to underwriting returns, and significantly reduced operational drag. For policyholders, it means lower premiums driven by reduced overhead, faster access to coverage, and products tailored to specific, real-world needs.

This alignment, where profitability improves for underwriters while costs decline for buyers, is rare in traditional financial markets. It becomes possible only when the underlying infrastructure is rebuilt.

DEIN's Approach

DEIN is building the infrastructure layer that makes this model viable at an institutional scale.

Our platform allows underwriting markets to be created, capitalized, and managed with speed and transparency, while maintaining the rigor required by sophisticated capital providers. Risk is evaluated programmatically. Pools are structured for clarity and accountability. Performance is observable in real time.

Decentralization does not mean abandoning discipline. It means replacing opaque, slow-moving processes with open, market-driven ones that can adapt as data evolves.

At approximately a $20 million fully diluted valuation, DEIN remains early in its lifecycle. The opportunity, however, is not early. The inefficiencies in insurance are well-documented. What has been missing is a system capable of removing them without compromising underwriting integrity or capital protection.

The Investment Case

Decentralized insurance is not a marginal improvement on the existing model. It is a structural shift.

As capital markets continue to adopt programmable finance, insurance stands out as one of the most compelling applications. The market is vast, the inefficiencies are measurable, and the demand for better, more accessible coverage is persistent. Research from firms like PwC has underscored how technology-led models are reshaping risk transfer and capital deployment across financial services.

For institutional investors, the question is no longer whether insurance will evolve, but who will build the rails that allow it to do so efficiently.

At DEIN, our focus is simple. Unlock new markets. Improve capital efficiency. Transform insurance from a slow, centralized industry into a dynamic, open financial system built for the next generation of risk.

The future of insurance will not be built behind closed doors. It will be built in the open, one market at a time.

About Mike Miglio

Mike Miglio is CEO and founder of DEIN, the decentralized marketplace for risk and insurance. A seasoned entrepreneur with six years of experience, he previously served as a founding partner of two of the world's first cryptocurrency law firms, ICO Law Group and Wolfe Miglio (2017), guiding dozens of projects and exchanges through the uncertain legal landscape of the ICO era. In 2020, he launched his first protocol, Bridge Mutual. Over the years, Mike has built and deployed protocols and projects with a combined market cap of $1 billion USD and has invested in or advised more than 50 other DeFi protocols across the crypto space. Most recently, DEIN earned 1st place in the Amazon Prime TV series Crypto Knights for its innovation and ingenuity.

About DEIN

DEIN, short for Decentralized Insurance Network, is a groundbreaking platform that offers permissionless, decentralized, and DAO-managed discretionary risk coverage. It is specifically designed to provide insurance for smart contracts, stablecoins, centralized exchanges, and other vital services within the DeFi ecosystem. The platform allows users to purchase coverage for their funds, enabling them to safeguard their assets against potential losses caused by hacks, rug-pulls, or other exploits leading to permanent loss of funds. Additionally, DEIN empowers individuals to actively participate in the insurance process by allowing them to provide coverage and liquidity for various smart contracts, exchanges, or listed services in exchange for yield.