Omnescient

Making insurance easy, transparent, and secure with the power of the blockchain.

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Inspiration

When talking to representatives from the SpartaHack sponsor Auto Owners Insurance, we were immediately interested in their hack for this year: "Best Hack to Prevent A Loss". From there, we tried to define loss; trying to veer away from the conventional definitions such as monetary loss. We soon realized that a very valid form of loss is loss of trust. While not tangible, loss of trust has huge impacts on individuals and businesses, especially in an interconnected, modern world. From there, the natural solution was to utilize blockchain: a trustless network with full transparency. Our idea is that the best way to prevent loss of trust is to not have any at all.

What it does

Our solution, Omnescient, provides a trustless infrastructure for insurance-related data collection, claim filing and claim reviewing. The idea is that since all of the information regarding details about the claim is fully transparent to the insurer and the insured. This way, it is easier to trust both parties when information can be freely viewed and checked.

How we built it

Using Blockchain and Web3, we designed a solution that takes sensor data, user claims and insurance information and publishes it to the blockchain. We also used Python to simulate a sensor.

Challenges we ran into

Sending data over the blockchain is mainly used for Smart Contracts. It was unclear whether you could send any data over the blockchain. It turns out that data derives meaning from how you treat it. If we treat data sent over the blockchain as regular JSON, you can use almost use blockchain as a decentralized API to transfer data. In addition, we had to formulate the problem correctly to account for all edge cases. The issue of preventing trust when it comes to insurance can get very deep, and we wanted a solution that accounts for as much as possible.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We feel that we succeeded in trying to come up with a problem statement that not only encompassed the challenge, but also was interesting. We also feel that we have a unique take on use-cases for blockchain technology.

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