稳定币终于找到真实收益：链上再保险协议Re

Bankless Nation, I'm here with Karan Saroya. He is the founder and CEO at Re. Karan, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

And uh back on the podcast today, we're getting some extra help here. Avichal from Electric [music] Capital, who is an investor in Re. Avichal, welcome back to the podcast.

Good to see you, man. Thanks for having us.

Karan, I'll just start you off with a the easy layup. Uh what is Re?

Yeah, we're we're on-chain reinsurer. We take in stable coins. Those stable coins find their way to primarily US insurance companies. That that capital lets them write insurance business. They collect premiums. Percolates all the way back to this on-chain capital layer. Uh and uh that's what it is. We back 35 insurance carriers with a half a billion in business. Um and should uh should grow to about a billion over the course of the next uh seven-ish months.

Cool. What do we need to know about reinsurance to be productive in this conversation? And why is a blockchain why are smart contracts the right substrate to build the frontier of reinsurance?

Yeah, yeah. It's look, it's a massive boring business. There's about a trillion in reinsurance premium that's processed annually across, you know, uh dozens of very large reinsurers. Munich Re, Swiss Re, Lloyd's of London. All of it is basically just a pot of opaque capital. It's attested to kind of asynchronously. Uh and the product that they sell is a promise. It's a promise to pay their insurance company customers if things happen.

And then the second part of that is to prove that they can pay at a given moment's notice, right? And so uh being on-chain and utilizing on-chain capital is probably the most elegant use case of of uh in my mind on-chain capital. And that is it fulfills both of those things. We take in capital that anyone in the world can can see at any given point in time. Regulators, insurance uh you know, insurance company customers, the insureds themselves, uh anyone with a computer can see that we are good for the promise and that we're solving at any given moment in time.

It's also a massive pool of capital that can that can take diversified risks and the cash flows back into this pool of capital being transparent um uh you know, something has never existed before in this space.

So, what part of the capital stack around reinsurance is blockchain tech doing this on smart contracts? Uh you know, you're built on Ethereum using stable coins. Uh what part of that are you improving? Now, is this like a um are you guys simply improving your the business model margins by using blockchains as your back end? Or what's what's really the secret sauce? What's the X factor here?

Yeah, so so in two parts. Um if you think about reinsurance as a product, it's another capital source for insurance companies. The first part is the manufacturer of of the product of reinsurance, the expense ratio is is lower. We're a much higher operating leverage business. We have a you know, less than a dozen employees. Uh we'll be on track to be a multi-billion dollar insurance market. Uh in comparison to legacy reinsurers that have tens of thousands employees, legacy business, legacy legacy infrastructure.

That's a meaningful difference in just the expense ratio load. And we're the first to find scale on with on-chain capital and build transformers into all DeFi protocols that now use us or or we're composable with to pull in capital in a way that hasn't been done before in this space. And our viewpoint is at scale as we as we kind of proliferate through you know, these world end markets as folks are using us our products on Pendle um and the like, that we have a cost of capital is competitive if not superior to practically every reinsurer in the Um and so there's nothing special about money that is used as security collateral to secure these obligations.

And we think we could just form that uh at a lower cost to a greater extent than anywhere else um within traditional insurance.

A visual, when you were talking to Karan, looking at Ree at Electric, uh your VC, you audit things, you kick the tires. Uh what got you excited about what Ree is doing, what what it can do?

Yeah, I so so maybe zooming cuz you know VCs are very high level, so zooming out for a second. The thing that that there are like two things that kind of caught my eye about this particular thing. Um uh and and it's a you know, I think if you step back and think about what is Ree, what I think the way to think about it is there's this regulated fintech business and it's a it's a registered Cayman Island, you know, you have to get licenses, there's regulators, there's there's rules you have to follow.

And then there's um the on-chain piece and the smart contract piece. Um and so kind of from an end consumer perspective or an end customer perspective, this just looks like a reinsurance business, right? It just solves the same problem. Um but there are two things behind the scenes that that make this work much much better. So, one is the fact that if everything runs on smart contracts, auditing and regulatory compliance become much cheaper and easier.

You know where your money is, you know how to track it, there's a ledger, it's everything's super clean. And and a lot of fintechs are about how do you move the money around and where's the money sitting? The second is uh I think the stablecoin capital market piece is really really really interesting. I think we have this like a lot of people have the concept of stablecoins and they're going to move money around and people want dollars.

And the way we think about this is okay, you're going to have today you have a couple hundred billion, you're going to end up with 5 trillion dollars of USD stablecoins on chain. And all of these people are going to say, yes, I'm so glad I have dollars now. Wouldn't it be great if I could make 4% using treasuries and then immediately a large percentage of those people, I think 20, 30, 40, 50, maybe 80% of them will say, wait a second, I would like to make more than 4%.

How do I do that? Uh and so they'll go hunting for yield. And so the really interesting thing about stablecoins, in my opinion, is that you have created a new capital market. You're going to have $5 trillion hunting for yield. And they will want products. Uh and so from a business perspective, yes, you have a fintech, but and if you look at a lot of these fintechs, you often have a very big capital markets function because so much of the job of a fintech is going to the capital markets and raising all the time.

This is why like Blackstone exists, right? They take all this debt, they tranche it, they securitize it, they sell it to the capital markets. There's pension funds on the back end. It's it's a whole apparatus. And what you've done is you've collapsed that whole thing now into a smart contract. And the stablecoin markets are just the capital markets now. And so I think the future architecture of fintechs looks something like what Re is now, which is on the front end it's a regulated fintech to the end customer.

It just does the same thing. It just solves the same problem. It's built on smart contracts so that the the operations of the business are much more efficient from a regulatory compliance perspective and there's AI agents and stuff built in and Karan can talk about that. And then you have this capital markets piece, which is a huge part of what it is to run a fintech. And and that is just the stablecoin markets on the chain.

Um so that architecture I think is is what the future of fintech looks like. Uh and I think Re is is the the first that's actually sort of pieced it all together and is making it work.

So I think what you're saying Avichal, correct me if I'm wrong, and then Karan, I think I want you to also hop in here, is that uh you know, if there's 170 billion dollars of stablecoins on Ethereum, that number is growing, everyone's bullish on

原文超出正文长度上限，此处截断——上游还有内容，完整版见上方「原文 ↗」。