SafeHome

Inspiration

The purpose of this project is to settle home insurance claims on-chain, in a decentralized and global manner via a crowd sourcing pool of funds. This removes the need for centralized entities that must always go through a due diligence process in order to determine if the insurance claim is legitimate. This process can be time consuming and in many cases can lead to the rejection of the claim itself.

What it does

HomeSafe is a home insurance protocol that settles claims on-chain by substituting any intermediary parties with home automation systems in order to achieve consensus. A variety of home automation systems already exist that provide a variety of features and help the owner gain insight on the state of the home such as smart home alarm systems, thermostats, air quality sensors, humidity sensors etc.

The HomeSafe protocol can leverage the output of these sensors and determine when an insurance claim is valid and proceed with finalizing the payment to the user. The claim amount is determined from the size of the pool, the type of insurance the user has and the current stake of the user in the pool. The claim amount is also affected by the total number of claims the user has done in the past.

How we built it

The frontend of the application is made with React while the smart contracts were developed using Remix and Ganache. An API client for the Minut Smart Home Monitoring was also used. Chainlink was used to fetch data from the centralized server into the HomeSafe protocol.

Challenges we ran into

There were numerous challenges throughout the whole project but the biggest one being: underestimating how much time things take

Several issues came up with state management (redux) that, in retrospect, could have been avoided with a bit more planning.
Smart contract interaction using ethers.js library

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall this was an amazing experience and I learned a ton of things. That was the reason for entering this Hackathon. I’m looking forward to the next one :)

What we learned

Reflecting on this Hackathon there are a couple of things I would do differently. First and foremost, I would start working much sooner than I did. One of the realizations I had was that concepts that I thought I understood were not clear and it immediately showed during implementation time. Another thing I would have focused on, would be the UI design. I do realize that there is a wonderful community that one can ask assistance from - as mentioned in the Discord channels - but when I entered this Hackathon I was extremely busy with my actual work and I felt that I would be unfair to my teammates.