The Lemonade Foundation formation of the Lemonade Crypto Climate Dao On Avalanche
Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition to offer climate insurance to the world’s most vulnerable farmers.
The Lemonade Foundation, the non-profit association created by Lemonade to produce an exponential social and environmental impact through technology, announced today the formation of the Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition.
The coalition is being constituted as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), dedicated to building and distributing at-cost, instantaneous, parametric weather insurance to subsistence farmers and livestock keepers in emerging markets. Alongside the Lemonade Foundation, founding coalition members include Avalanche, Chainlink, DAOstack, Etherisc, Hannover Re, Pula, and Tomorrow.io.
The climate insurance will be architected as a stablecoin-denominated, decentralized application (dApp) on Avalanche, an eco-friendly proof-of-stake blockchain. Farmers will be able to make and receive payments with ease from their phone using global stablecoins or local currencies, much as they do for banking and payments today. An initial rollout in Africa is expected within the year.
“The Lemonade Foundation was established to build exponentially-impactful technologies,” said Daniel Schreiber, Director at the Lemonade Foundation. “By using a DAO instead of a traditional insurance company, smart contracts instead of insurance policies, and oracles instead of claims professionals, we expect to harness the communal and decentralized aspects of web3 and real-time weather data to deliver affordable and instantaneous climate insurance to the people who need it most.”
“Insurance has always been a prime use case for smart contracts, empowering faster payments and accelerated recoveries,” said John Wu, President of Ava Labs. “By launching on Avalanche, Lemonade’s application will not only move faster than any other smart contract platform, but also leverage technology leading the way toward eco-friendly Web3 applications. Avalanche uses just 46 U.S. Households of energy annually, compared to 1.6M for Ethereum.”
“Africa has an estimated 300 million smallholder farmers. The majority face real climate risks to their livelihoods, as traditional, indemnity-based insurance is often unaffordable or unavailable to them,” said Rose Goslinga, co-founder of Pula, a Kenya-based insurtech that specializes in digital and agricultural insurance to de-risk millions of smallholder farmers across Africa. “This is where the power of the Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition comes in: An on-chain solution that can be immediately impactful at scale will allow farmers to finally get financially protected against the increasingly frequent risks such as drought.”
The Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition is a prime example of how innovative solutions built on the blockchain can drive global financial inclusion previously unavailable,” said Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink, the market-leading blockchain oracle solution. “We plan to make the Chainlink team and platform available to L3C in an effort to protect the millions of farmers who depend on what they grow from the devastation of climate change.”
The Lemonade Foundation will provide the initial capital to backstop the DAO’s smart contracts, and in time all crypto investors will be able to fund the DAO’s liquidity pool. The DAO will also issue a governance token to reward participation by the broader community.
