Hey everyone!

I just wanted to give a quick update on what the dev team has been working on. Our team has grown quite a lot over the last week, and people have been ramping up on the existing code base and our proposed architecture. Some of the devs have been on vacation, so we’re hoping to have a “hackathon” this upcoming weekend to really make some headway into a prototype and at least have some basic workflows working.

On Friday, we met and discussed some of the outstanding questions regarding the community, fairness in voting, and the optimal way to launch. We ended up taking a lot of notes on a napkin :-) https://i.imgur.com/RiIbX0w.jpg

We agree that limiting the maximum/minimum payouts initially is a good idea until we reach equilibrium in the float pool. We also had very interesting discussions about how votes should be weighed, how to incentivize people to vote on claims, and minimum votes required to pay out. We are leaning against weighing votes — that could devolve into an oligarchy type situation. Those with the biggest policies, the most reputation, or otherwise the greatest vote weights could be in a position of tremendous power. We want to avoid introducing this unfairness and really let the community evolve organically. We are also leaning towards policyholders paying a small fee in UMC with that paid out to users voting on their claim. This fee will be used to pay people to vote on the claim. We like this idea for two reasons. A) It incentivizes people to vote on claims which have fewer votes — this means they get a bigger piece of the fee than a vote that has many votes. Avoiding a flat payout encourages participation distributed across claims. B) It will discourage people from submitting fraudulent claims — they would have to pay the fee and, if their fraud was discovered, they would lose their policy entirely. In the same vein of community growth and reaching a consensus, we want the community to have a forum for discussion for each claim. We want theme to share information and allow their expertise in certain areas to show. We also want to prevent users from submitting duplicate claims, or submitting duplicate evidence across accounts. We’re thinking of having a “similarity score” between two claims based on the parameters submitted when making a claim (amount, area, day of occurrence etc.) and the data they submit (receipt, video, photo) and giving that information to users.

The team is really excited to build this product and get something working and able to be used by the community quickly. We want to surface as much information as possible to let the community reach a consensus in a fair and reasonable manner, and build on this system going forward.

Thanks for your continued support!