Blockchain and crypto insurance

There are many different types of insurance that businesses in the digital asset industry need to think about. We typically place four main covers for our clients:

Professional indemnity / technology liability: Just because you work with zero trust architecture doesn’t mean it’s free of bugs or being used in an unintended way. Professional indemnity (aka technology liability, or errors and omissions) protects you from allegations of a third party that they suffered a financial loss due to your professional or technology services. This could be from an error in your software, losses arising out of your professional negligence when executing trades, unintentional copyright infringement or a breach of contract.

Cyber: Cyber won’t cover hacking of your private keys, but it will cover you for hacking of your data, ransomware attacks, cyber business interruption and denial of service attacks (among others). If you process or hold sensitive and/or significant amounts of data, you should really consider insuring your company against the risks associated with running a digital business. This cover is fast becoming a ‘must have’ for digital businesses and is now being asked for in most commercial contracts.

Directors and officers liability (D&O): If you’re a director or officer of a company your personal assets are at risk for the decisions you make on behalf of the company. Whether it be trying to attract new investors or protect the existing ones, D&O is an absolute must in an ever changing regulatory environment.

Crime/Specie: The protection of your private keys is of the utmost importance. If you are holding private keys for yourself or others you should think carefully about insuring these and the risk management that comes around the holding of cryptographic material. We can provide insurance solutions for both hot and cold wallets, although hot is harder to find due to the higher risk nature of this architecture.

No, cyber insurance is there to protect you for claims arising out of data breaches, ransomware, denial of service attacks and business interruption of your computer networks. Cyber insurance does not typically cover theft of private keys, this could be covered under crime insurance.

This depends on what type of policy you purchase and exactly what your business does. No two businesses are the same and risk profiles can be completely different even among similar business models. As the insurance industry is small and education is lacking around digital assets, there are only a handful of insurers that are underwriting risks in this space. This means that premiums are typically higher than traditional technology or financial services businesses as underwriters need to make sure they charge a higher rate to pay for claims at a later date and justify their underwriting. Although we can’t put an exact number on how much you should pay for your insurance without doing our pre-underwriting review and consultation, we are always educating new insurers and bringing new capacity into the market to ensure we provide the best available price with the best available coverage.

Most regulators need to see some sort of professional indemnity insurance in place as well as some cover for data risks and cyber attacks which would be covered under a cyber policy. We are experienced in placing cover for some of the most common jurisdictions that regulate cryptocurrency including: UK, USA, Australia, Canada, and across Europe, including Malta and Gibraltar.

Limits will depend on the regulator, but if you’re a startup you’ll most likely need at least 1m in PI cover to pay claims arising out of your professional services.

You don’t need to start the policy until you are granted regulation, but often you’ll need a quote for the regulatory approval process.

As demand is far outpacing supply in this new industry, we counsel our clients to start the process at the very least six weeks before you need the insurance to start. We take an initial client call to understand your business and ask you a number of pre-underwriting questions to tease out specific risks with your business model that underwriters will be looking for. We find that being proactive in our approach to asking the right questions usually allows us to be quicker than our competitors and provide the underwriters with a better understanding of the risk which will make sure you’re covered correctly.

Yes, we’ve placed insurance for businesses operating in many different countries with clients all over the world from Abu Dhabi to Sweden. Wherever you’re based we can help.

You name it, we’ve seen it. Whether it be tokenisation platforms, NFT verification networks, exchanges, custodians, blockchain developers, DeFi, mining operations and many more. We’ve worked with many household names as well as the newcomers who will be shaping this space for years to come. Rest assured that your business will be at home in our community of digital asset clients.

We work with brokers all around the world to help place their specialist cryptocurrency clients. We represent you to the London market and help get your clients the coverage they need, we can be as hands off or hands on as you’d like and a full pre-underwriting service to get the right information up front.