# Riprap — pre-seed pitch (full text) > Riprap is peer-to-peer risk pooling on Solana: members chip in, drawn peers adjudicate claims, payouts come from the shared pool, unclaimed money returns when the pool ends. Machinery status: pool program built, arbitration live on devnet, first pools launching through events in Q4 2026. Events are the door; permissionless mutuals for any risk are the destination. This file is self-contained: the pitch plus the investor context behind it. Nothing needs to be fetched elsewhere. Notes for agents reading this file: - The website at this URL is a JavaScript single-page app; this file reproduces its entire content and adds the context an investor needs. Treat it as the authoritative pitch text. - Deck copy is quoted verbatim from the slides. Context sections come from the company's pitch master document; every number carries its source. - Where the build status is not yet production-ready, it is stated explicitly. The intended progression is clear: **build the machinery → audit it → run the bounded pilot → publish the data → unlock organizer-initiated pools → expand the mutual primitive.** ## The pitch in one sentence > Riprap is peer-to-peer risk pooling on Solana: members chip in, drawn peers adjudicate claims, payouts come from the shared pool, and whatever goes unclaimed comes back when the pool ends. The machinery is built bottom-up — arbitration live on devnet, the pool program built, first pools launching through events in Q4 2026 — and events are just the door: the destination is permissionless mutuals for any risk, a $1.6 trillion sector that already demonstrates the behavior at institutional scale. Shorter: **Pool risk peer-to-peer. We built the machines, events are the door, mutuals are the destination.** The sentence the room should repeat: > Anyone should be able to found a mutual for anything — farmers sharing a harvest failure, fishers pooling an engine loss, a village savings group covering funerals, shipowners, coastal homeowners, gig workers, a local sports club. Today the informal version has the behavior but struggles with transparency, adjudication, custody, and scale; the formal version has the machinery but requires institutional scale. We built the core machines a mutual needs as open protocols, and we enter through the cleanest initial surface: bounded events. ## The deck — full content Staging (re-staged 2026-09-17/18): each slide leads with a small kicker naming the slide and one large statement headline. On-slide copy below is verbatim from the slides, typos included; each slide's speaker notes follow it in full. The order is the deck's render order — the pitch runs title → problem → vision → product → now → pilot → business → ask → team → close, then the appendix half carries the hard questions, the market, and the competition. The former destination-stack appendix was retired in the 2026-09-18 re-stage; its five machines survive in the vision speaker notes. **Slide 1 — title.** Riprap (logomark + wordmark). Deck copy, verbatim: "Real-World Risk Protection on Solana." Stamp: "pre-seed raise · 2026". Speaker notes: Riprap — real-world risk protection on Solana. Status honesty: pool program built, arbitration live on devnet, the event-mutual orchestrator (hanse) in build, payment rail live on mainnet. Pre-Seed raise, 2026. **Slide 2 — the problem.** Kicker: "the problem". Headline: "Insurance is a slow, expensive monolith." One number carried very large, its meaning beside it, verbatim: "~26¢ — of every premium dollar is spent before a claim is paid." Two bullets under it: "and it still takes 30 to 60 days on average"; "microinsurances often infeasible". Source, in mono: "Verisk/APCIA '25". (The solvency and jurisdiction rows were retired in the 2026-09-18 re-stage — the vision table still carries those ✗.) Speaker notes: the frame — traditional insurance is a slow, expensive monolith. One number, very big: ~26¢ of every US premium dollar is spent before a claim is paid (Verisk/APCIA '25) — the fixed-cost back office; at that floor microinsurance is often infeasible. **Slide 3 — the vision.** Kicker: "the vision". Headline: "DeFi broke finance. Insurance is next." The slide is the comparison table — same business, different rails. Columns "traditional insurance" / "web3 insurance", one ✓/✗ mark per cell: | | traditional insurance | web3 insurance | | ----------------- | --------------------- | -------------- | | pool money | ✓ | ✓ | | decide payouts | ✓ | ✓ | | transparent | ✗ | ✓ | | fast | ✗ | ✓ | | global & 24/7/365 | ✗ | ✓ | | permissionless | ✗ | ✓ | | composable | ✗ | ✓ | Speaker notes: why the world is ripe for internet insurance. Call a smart contract what it is: business logic that runs 24/7/365 — autonomous, permissionless, transparent. No surprise defi trading works great on-chain — it is well-understood business logic. You know what else is well-understood business logic? Insurance. Then the table, top to bottom: the first two rows are the business — traditional insurance pools money and decides payouts, and so does web3 insurance; every row below is the rails — transparent (the balance is a public number — solvency provable, not asserted), fast (payouts in minutes, not days), global & 24/7/365, permissionless (anyone with a wallet), composable (pools stack into tranched capital) — web3 only. Overhead dies on the way: the ~26¢-per-dollar back office becomes transaction fees. The five-machine destination stack moved to the appendix — walk it there if asked. Segue: so why doesn't on-chain insurance exist today — the problem, next slide. **Slide 4 — the product.** Kicker: "the product". Headline: "on-chain rails for insurance contracts". Lifecycle strip: join → gather → rule → claim — labels and bodies, verbatim (the liquidate plate stays off the pitch): - **01 members joining** — joining members approve a hash-linked document with the terms for the pool. build the basis for the pools purpose. - **02 money gathers** — a pool collects the capital for insurances individually. No money flows between insurance instances. - **03 peers decide** — claims adjudicate on-chain with staked jurors, sealed-then-revealed votes, bounded appeals, slashed incoherence. - **04 a claim is paid** — after peers approve, the funds are released right away. Solana settles funds and accounting instantly. Context: Nexus validates demand for on-chain protection, while Riprap explores a different architecture: user-created, isolated mutuals rather than a protocol-centered protection marketplace. Speaker notes: one mutual, one risk, a lifetime of its choosing — event pools expire by clock; open-ended mutuals liquidate when members choose. Walk the lifecycle strip: join, gather, rule, claim. Three laws: two exit doors (no discretionary signer); members judge members (Accord — useaccord.xyz — staked jurors, sealed votes, appeals, slashing); an enforced end either way. Status row verbatim if asked: pool built, arbitration on devnet, hanse in build, Tributary on mainnet. Audits gate mainnet capital — that is what the raise funds first. **Slide 5 — the now.** Kicker: "the now". Headline: "all the pieces are falling together now". Three plates — strip label, head, body, verbatim; the ✓ stamp marks the pieces built by us: - **01 premiums settle stable — stablecoin settlement on solana** — Premiums and claims must settle in something people actually want to hold, like USDC. There's now a much bigger institutional distribution layer than there was 12 months ago. Meanwhile regulatory clarity has been established in the US (GENIUS Act) and the EU (MiCA). - **02 recurring premiums pull — pull payments on solana** (✓ built by us) — recurring premium payments must be convenient and reliable — which they cannot be without pull payment support on Solana. tributary.so - **03 claims adjudicate — claims adjudication on-chain** (✓ built by us) — with the recent development of Accord for on-chain dispute resolution and adjudication, the required tool now exists for permissionless and decentralized claims adjudication. useaccord.xyz Speaker notes: why now — three pieces landing together. First: settlement — insurance has one hard requirement: premiums and claims must be denominated and paid in an asset people actually want to hold; SOL's volatility against the underlying risk never qualified, and Solana's stablecoin layer is now deep enough to rely on — $16.3B supply Q2 2026 vs $11B a year earlier, Visa settling USDC since late 2025, Western Union launching USDPT in 2026, GENIUS Act federal framework making the layer institutionally usable. No FX conversion, no correspondent banking, no T+2 — the chain becomes the payment rail for the insurance contract. Second: recurring premiums need pull payments — Tributary, live on mainnet, built by us. Third: permissionless, decentralized claims adjudication — Accord, live, built by us. Land: two of the three prerequisites are already ours — settlement arrived on its own, the rails underneath are built. Segue: the pilot — where the machine first runs for real, next slide. **Slide 6 — the pilot.** Kicker: "the pilot". Headline: "a knife-assault mutual aid for breakpoint". Deck copy, verbatim: "Blade Pool @ Breakpoint 2026 run in front of the entire Solana ecosystem." (the Blade Pool stamp in accent mono). Facts card, verbatim: "Olympia, London · 15–17 November 2026 · 8,000+ attendees". Tiers — entry → payout cap: basic $10 → $1,000; standard $20 → $2,000; premium $40 → $4,000 (policy §5). Why events, why Breakpoint first — three reasons on the slide, verbatim (heads only): - **the cleanest legal surface** - **the solana family is loyal** - **cover sponsorships (e.g. regional superteams)** Speaker notes: events are the door — five reasons, none of them market size: the cleanest legal surface (discretionary mutual, crypto-native members, bounded window — no counsel spend at pilot scale); funds locked up briefly (a pool lives for the event window, then pays approved claims, returns the rest, dissolves — numbers published either way); the Solana family is loyal (Breakpoint concentrates the ecosystem in one hall — the space adopts its own and talks about what ships, so the pilot's first audience is the space itself); the organizer is a B2B2C channel — one sale brings the attendee list; covers can be sponsored — companies or regional superteams buying for their members. The pilot itself: Blade Pool at Breakpoint, Olympia London, 15–17 Nov 2026, 8,000+ attendees (solana.com/breakpoint); tiers $10/$20/$40 capped at $1k/$2k/$4k (policy §5); worked example (policy §10): 1,000 × $20 → $20,000 pooled; 4 approved claims × $2,000 → $8,000 paid; $12,000 returned → $12 back each; quiet event: every cent returns. Then the 2027 circuit — the PMF signal and the primary milestone: organizer-initiated pools, an organizer who shows up without us. **Slide 7 — the business.** Kicker: "the business". Headline (two lines): "Same insurance economics / unlimited room to experiment." Ladder, verbatim: - **0%** — protocol take on pool #1, the pilot exists to confirm the market - **% of surplus** — take-rate, switched on with the subsequent pools, doubles as the organizer revenue-share - **operating fees** — running flagship pools for sponsors who want the product but not the ops - **other options** — The correct monetization should emerge from usage. Footer, verbatim: "USDC end to end. No product token required." Speaker notes: revenue-first ladder: 0% take on the pilot (it exists to publish numbers); take-rate on surplus switched on with the second pool — doubles as the organizer revenue-share; operator fees for flagship deployments; at the destination, a rail share on mutuals we do not operate. USDC end to end, no product token. The raise carries a token warrant over staked reserve capital — protection yield — bounded to a fixed share of any future supply with terms published before the round opens; the preferred end state is token-only via MetaDAO — value to the DAO, not the cap table. The warrant is the term we negotiate hardest. **Slide 8 — the ask.** Kicker: "the ask". Headline: "raising $700k pre-seed at $7M". Terms: - **$700k** — raise; range $600–800k. - **SAFE + warrant** — post-money; token warrant, bounded and defined pre-open. - **$7M post** — opening cap; 10% dilution. - **18 months** — runway; primary milestone: organizer-initiated pools. Stamp: "capital → de-risk → prove → unlock organizer-initiated pools". Steps: 1. security — audit the arbitration layer and the pool/hanse programs; 2. product — hanse orchestrator → SDK → end-to-end suite; 3. proof — the Blade Pool pilot, results published; 4. legal — the structure for broader membership; 5. growth — convert pilot traction into organizer-initiated pools. Deck copy, verbatim: "What $100k gets you to: not 18 months — from an audited working product and an operational pilot to a repeatable network of organizer-initiated pools." Speaker notes: $700k on a post-money SAFE plus a bounded token warrant; range $600–800k; opening cap $7M post — 10%; 18 months; primary milestone organizer-initiated pools. The narrative: capital → de-risk → prove → unlock — security, product, proof, legal, growth. If asked what $100k gets an angel to: from an audited working product and an operational pilot to a repeatable network of organizer-initiated pools. Angel-ladder construction stays private. **Slide 9 — the team.** Kicker: "the team". Headline: "decades of shipping in the team". Personas, verbatim: Dr.-Ing. Fabian Schuh · founder — Dr.-Ing., engineering; full-time crypto since 2014; first hire paid by a blockchain, ever; BitShares escrow & treasury — built; [fabian@die-schuhs.de](mailto:fabian@die-schuhs.de) · x.com/@xer0c. Corinna · ai agent — centuries of experience; the unrelenting; number cruncher; devils advocate; on shift 24/7. Achievement wall (verbatim from the slide): Accord — on-chain arbitration · live; 2× Gold · Colosseum Frontier 2026; Tributary — Solana payment rail · mainnet; Solana Foundation grant · 2026; Riprap — pool program · built; 500M+ blocks produced; first hire by a blockchain, ever; Canon — curated-list registry on Accord; Synod — N-party escrow on Accord; BitShares escrow & worker treasury; python-bitshares — full L1 SDK; Solana Security #2 graduate; Cypherpunk · $10k · 2025; Superteam Germany grant · 2024; Advisor to MakerDAO; graphenelib — SDK for a chain family; committee seats: Steem/Hive/BTS; exits: Steemit · Streemian · Cryptonomex; RADAR · honorable mention · 2024; repo.trade — launchpad for repos; chaoscraft — 1,000 minds, 1 codebase; committee · Graphene Foundation. Speaker notes: who builds this — the human and the AI teammate. Left: Dr.-Ing. Fabian Schuh — full-time crypto since 2014, first person hired and paid directly by a blockchain, built the BitShares escrow and worker-proposal treasury, Solana Security #2. Right: Corinna — BD, social, analytics, on shift 24/7. The scrolling wall is ambience — twenty years of shipping, on-chain since 2014. Gesture once, don't read it. **Slide 10 — close.** The surfaces: riprap.xyz — the platform; useaccord.xyz — the arbitration layer; @riprapxyz — the build log. Tagline: **Pool risk peer-to-peer.** Speaker notes: the surfaces — riprap.xyz, useaccord.xyz (the arbitration layer), the repo, the build log. Hold on the tagline: pool risk peer-to-peer. Conversations after. **Slide 11 — appendix — the hard questions.** Kicker: "the problems". Headline: "The hard questions that need solving." Four cards — index, question, answer, verbatim from the slides (typos included): - **01 — Can you legally do this?** The mutual is limited in scope and time to avoid UK insurance regulation in this particular use case. We review regulations step by step as we progress. For full-fledged insurance, regulations might apply. The extend: unknown. - **02 — Can strangers adjudicate claims?** Adjudication is key; optimal parameters must be set case by case. We've defined them for the pilot. For pilot, clear no! Foundation has been layed out to integrate Solana's Attestation system. That allows specifying jurors clearly. - **03 — Why the such a pilot first?** The cheapest place to find adjudication failures: capped payouts ($1k–4k), tiny stakes ($10–40), bounded lifetime, one venue. Go to market quickly, with least regulatory risk and attrack attention. - **04 — Who builds the company?** Started solo, became a real business. None of this would've happened without mtnDAO. On-chain insurance has been on our minds for half a decade. Aiming for insurance/regulatory counsel as advisor and a risk/legal hire post-raise. Speaker notes: the appendix opens with the four questions every IC asks, one card each — problem on top, our answer on the plate. Legal: the mutual is deliberately limited in scope and time to stay outside UK insurance regulation; scope widens step by step as we progress. Adjudication: the company risk, owned — parameters are case by case and defined for the pilot; the metric set publishes from Blade Pool onward. Blade Pool: the cheapest place to find adjudication failures — payouts capped $1k–4k, stakes $10–40, one venue, a bounded lifetime. Team: started solo, became a real business — none of it without mtnDAO, and on-chain insurance has been on our minds for half a decade. **Slide 12 — the market.** Kicker: "the market". Headline: "Millions of communities don't fit conventional insurances". Deck copy, verbatim: "We are building the infrastructure that lets those groups create their own risk pools." The four walls, verbatim: - **too small** — a savings circle to start a small business. a sports club covering rent for one season. - **too geographically specific** — one bay's coastal homeowners. one valley's harvest failure. - **too short-duration** — a three-day conference. a fishing season. a tournament. - **too low-premium** — a one time $20 payment for a limited time cover EVIDENCE rows, read plainly (source): $424B annual protection gap nobody covers (Swiss Re sigma '25); 344M / 88% — covered by microinsurance / of target still uncovered (Micro Insurance Network '24); ~26¢ of every US P&C premium dollar spent before a claim is paid (Verisk/APCIA '25); $1.61T mutual premiums a year — the behavior, already formalized (ICMIF '24). Speaker notes: the story first, then the numbers: millions of communities are too small, too geographically specific, too short-duration, or too low-premium for conventional insurance economics — a $20, 3-day, single-peril cover is sub-economic by construction when ~26¢ of every US P&C premium dollar is spent before a claim is paid (Verisk/APCIA '25). We are building the infrastructure that lets those groups create their own risk pools. Then read the evidence, do not editorialize: $424B protection gap (Swiss Re '25); 344M covered, 88% uncovered (MiN '24); ~26¢ per premium dollar (Verisk '25); $1.61T mutual premiums — the same behavior, formalized (ICMIF '24). If asked: $136B alternative capital gated at $200k QIB tickets (Aon '25); on-chain, $3.4B stolen per year against a $104M cover sector (Chainalysis, DeFiLlama); market scan — Nexus Mutual $5.7M cover fees '25, $2.7M raised ever, $1B+ purchased; OpenCover $4.6M seed '22–23, $141.6M protected '25. Close: one machine addresses every row — a mutual becomes a transaction, surplus returns by rule, the back office is the chain. **Slide 13 — the competition.** Kicker: "the competition". Headline: "there's basically no competitor." The incumbents' table — columns FEES '25 / RAISED / COVER, chain in tiny type (every row reads ethereum or off-chain, so the missing Solana column is the argument): | | chain | FEES '25 | RAISED | COVER | | ------------ | ------------------------------ | ---------------------- | -------------------- | ----------------------- | | Nexus Mutual | ethereum · arbitrum · kyc | $5.7M · cover fees '25 | $2.7M · ever · no VC | $1B+ · purchased '25 | | OpenCover | base · ethereum · off-chain co | — · undisclosed | $4.6M · seed '22–23 | $141.6M · protected '25 | Below, one chip per named failure — "why every on-chain attempt so far failed", verbatim and in order: ✗ governance token required · ✗ on-chain events only · ✗ one pool for every risk · ✗ none are permissionless · ✗ upfront lump sum (Neptune Mutual) · ✗ exploited itself (Cover Protocol) · ✗ shared idle pool (Solace) · ✗ web3 portfolio cover (OpenCover) · ✗ no float income (Unslashed) · ✗ twenty thin chains (InsurAce) · ✗ farmed, not mutual (Bridge Mutual) · ✗ token-vote claims (Neptune Mutual) · ✗ wLUNA collateral (Risk Harbor). Speaker notes: gesture once, don't read it: the 2020–22 graveyard, one named failure per project — Neptune Mutual (upfront lump sum; token-vote claims), Cover Protocol (exploited itself), Solace (shared idle pool), OpenCover (web3 portfolio cover), Unslashed (no float income), InsurAce (twenty thin chains), Bridge Mutual (farmed, not mutual), Risk Harbor (wLUNA collateral). Same lesson at company scale: the rails were never the whole machine — custody without adjudication, one pool, or permissioning is just a slower bank. If asked, the mutual-history backing: pooled protection is the oldest fix — the formal version is $1.61T and represents a substantial established market (ICMIF '24/'26); the informal version dies of opacity, disputes, and scale, which is why the friendly societies became licensed mutuals — formalization fixed trust at the price of the charter. The solvency and jurisdiction pains stay in Q&A — the vision table carries those ✗. Land: the behavior is universal, the on-ramp does not exist. Segue: the product — the rails that remove each ✗, next slide. | Project | Failed/closed because… | | --------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Neptune Mutual** | **Closed its cover marketplaces** and returned pool liquidity; announced this was “the end of the journey” for the team. ([LinkedIn][1]) | | **Cover Protocol** | **Suffered a ~$4M exploit and subsequently shut down**. | | **Solace** | **Ceased operations amid financial constraints**. | | **OpenCover** | **Not failed/closed.** Still operating and expanding; current product is cross-chain/multi-protocol cover. ([OpenCover][2]) | | **Unslashed Finance** | **technically failed.** Current evidence is mixed; architectural limitations. | | **InsurAce** | **technically failed.** Activity has declined materially. ([spark.money][3]) | | **Bridge Mutual** | **technically failed** based on the evidence reviewed. | | **Risk Harbor** | **technically failed/closed**; it evolved/rebranded rather than providing a clean shutdown case. | [1]: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/neptune-mutual_after-much-deliberation-and-careful-thought-activity-7213518327808225280-ipl5?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Neptune Mutual closes cover marketplaces | Neptune Mutual posted on the topic | LinkedIn" [2]: https://opencover.com/opencover-expands-institutional-risk-protection-to-solana/?utm_source=chatgpt.com "OpenCover expands institutional risk protection to Solana" [3]: https://www.spark.money/tools/stablecoin-insurance-coverage-comparison?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Stablecoin Insurance and Protection Mechanisms Compared | Spark" ## The problem — the oldest fix in finance has no on-ramp Mutual protection is what people do wherever no company will sell them cover, and it predates the companies: farmers share a harvest failure, fishers pool an engine loss, village savings groups cover a funeral. The formal version is $1.61T a year in premiums across 4,700+ societies — 26.1% of world insurance, a record year (ICMIF 2026). The informal version — ROSCAs, stokvels, tontines, burial societies, group chats with a cash box — spans continents and centuries. Between the two sits a missing infrastructure layer: - The informal pool fails the same ways everywhere. It runs on trust, cash, and a spreadsheet: opacity makes scale difficult, serious disputes need an adjudication mechanism, and larger groups introduce increasingly difficult coordination and opportunism problems. This is why the friendly societies and fraternal orders of the 19th century became the licensed mutuals of the 20th — the formalization solved institutional trust and scale at the price of the charter. - Founding a formal mutual is an institutional project. Charter, license, capital, actuarial staff, distribution — the same fixed-cost wall that keeps insurers from $20 products (US P&C spends ~26 cents of every premium dollar before a claim is paid; Verisk/APCIA 2025, III) keeps many smaller communities from founding their own. The minimum ticket to start a mutual is an institution. So the behavior is universal and the infrastructure for doing it credibly at small scale is missing. Anyone who wants to pool one specific risk with one specific community today chooses between an informal pool and the institutional machinery of formal insurance. The reframe: move the pool on-chain. A mutual becomes a transaction — terms in code and a committed document, custody in a program with two exit doors, adjudication by staked peers, surplus back by rule, death by crank. The informal group keeps its scale and gets transparent accounting, explicit terms, programmable adjudication, and deterministic dissolution; the formal sector's fixed-cost machinery is no longer required at every pool. PMF discipline, stated before it is asked: pre-revenue and pre-launch; the first wedge is small by design — event-scoped pools, one event, one price ($10/$20/$40), a 3-day coverage window, the cleanest initial legal surface. Join rate, claim rate, adjudication quality, renewal, and organizer-initiated demand are real numbers within weeks of the first pool closing. Events are the measurement instrument and the channel; every cohort named above is the market, and each arrives as its own pool the moment a sponsor, association, or group of two wants it. The central investment question is therefore unusually concrete: **can the machinery work in a real bounded mutual, can members use it, and will organizers initiate the next pool?** The raise is designed to answer those questions with audited software and public operating data rather than with a larger slide deck. ## The product — one mutual, one risk, a lifetime of its choosing A Riprap mutual is founded for one defined risk and a lifetime of its own choosing. Event pools are finite by design (an event, a season, a cohort): members chip in a fixed entry and pick a tier; the tier caps the maximum payout before anything happens. An incident during the window produces a claim with evidence; jurors — drawn at random, staked members of the same pool — adjudicate against cover terms committed at founding. Approved claims pay from the shared pool, scaled down proportionally if claims ever exceed it. Open-ended mutuals instead live on for as long as their members want them, contributing, claiming, and settling period after period, until the members decide to liquidate. Three properties carry the design: 1. **Two exit doors, no third.** Money leaves a pool only by spending (governed by adjudication) or liquidation (governed by the ownership authority — the members' collective hand in an open-ended mutual, never an operator's). No discretionary signer, ever. 2. **Members judge members.** Adjudication runs on Accord (useaccord.xyz) — staked jurors, private-then-revealed votes, bounded appeals, slashed incoherence. The mutual configures its own jury; anyone can read how the arbitration layer works end to end. 3. **An enforced end, either way.** An expiring mutual dissolves by permissionless crank once its term passes — it cannot linger, cannot be captured, cannot become a treasury; every unused cent returns pro-rata. An open-ended mutual ends when its members choose: the same crank, pulled by decision instead of by clock. Ending is a property of the pool, not a promise an operator can withhold. ## Claims — the cover terms are the contract, the jury applies them A licensed insurer's claims look objective because a policy existed before the incident. Mutual claims work the same way, minus the insurer: the rules are written first, the judgment comes after. Two layers, kept separate: - **The cover terms are the contract.** Every mutual is founded with its own written agreement — the cover terms — hash-committed on chain before the first member joins: the peril, the window, the place, the tiers and caps, the exclusions, and what a claim must carry. For a serious mutual it may as well be drafted as a legal contract; for the pilot it is a public document (the Blade Pool policy). Jurors answer one question: did the event that actually happened fall inside the written rules? - **The protocol is policy-agnostic.** What counts as proof — a police report, a medical record, witness attestations, on-chain facts — is a term among terms, chosen by the founders of that mutual and readable by anyone before joining. One mutual may require a police report within 24 hours; another may accept two witnessed statements; the machinery is identical either way. The detail lives in the document, not the code, so a mutual's rules can sharpen without anyone shipping a smart-contract change. The questions a claims process has to survive, and where each one is answered: - **What counts as a covered event?** The cover terms. Blade Pool policy §3 defines knife assault; §4 excludes self-caused, accidental, consensual, and out-of-scope injuries. The definition is public before anyone pays. - **Police involved? Witnesses required?** A cover-terms clause, not a protocol feature. Each mutual writes its evidence requirements; jurors check the claim against them. - **Incident 100m outside the venue?** The covered area is a definition in the terms. The jurors find where the incident happened; the terms draw the line. - **Claimant provoked the fight? Both parties intoxicated?** However the terms answer it — an explicit exclusion, or the jury's judgment where the terms are silent. Ambiguity lands on the jury by design; the finding is public, and the next version of those terms writes the lesson in. - **Injury surfaced 12 hours later?** The window binds the incident, not its discovery — the claims window stays open past coverage end (the pilot: 14 days) so late-manifesting injuries can still be filed and judged. - **Manufactured evidence?** Evidence goes encrypted to the drawn jurors only, hash-committed on chain, watermarked per juror. Beyond the plumbing it is the jury's judgment — and the pilot's attack bounty pays anyone who lands a fraudulent claim through the jury. - **Jurors know the claimant? The attacker is also a member?** The draw is random at dispute time — panels cannot be groomed in advance — and conflicts are the terms' problem to define and the jury's to weigh. Not solved; bounded. - **A $2,000 claim against a $20 juror stake?** The sharpest open question, answered honestly: juror economics are **not finalized**. The mechanism is fixed — stake-gated draws, sealed votes, slashed incoherence, a bounded appeal ladder, claimant-paid fees that junk filings must eat. The parameters — stake relative to claim size, slash depth, appeal cost — stay unfrozen until the pilot produces real numbers: draw turnout, deliberation quality, cost to attack. The design constraint is written down: juror skin must scale with the treasury it guards, and the stake base and its concentration are public on chain, so a reviewer can check rather than take it on faith. The protocol makes the mechanism decentralized and auditable. The cover terms make the truth question answerable — in writing, in advance, per mutual. Neither layer makes judgment automatic; both make it accountable. The remaining adjudication uncertainty is therefore not hidden: it is the primary empirical question of the pilot. The design already specifies the mechanism; the pilot supplies the data needed to calibrate the economics and demonstrate performance under real claims. ## Why web3 — the $20 product is impossible with a company in the middle A web2 version of this product has to custody the pot, staff the claims desk, and keep the leftovers. Custody makes it a money transmitter or an insurer depending on structure and jurisdiction: licenses, reserves, chargebacks, AML per disbursement, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. A claims desk costs more per claim than a very small product can support — the same fixed-cost wall that keeps insurers out. And a company holding unclaimed money creates an additional trust problem: "we promise to dissolve" is weaker than a protocol whose dissolution is enforced by its rules. On Solana the three cost centers are protocol properties: - Custody, reconciliation, payout rails → a program holding USDC in one vault with two governed exits; payouts settle to any wallet in minutes at low transaction cost. - Claims department, adjusters, SIU → peer adjudication: staked jurors paid per dispute, claimant pre-pays the fee, incoherent jurors are slashed. - Solvency assurance, brand, trust → the pool balance is a public number; every contribution, verdict, and payout is a public fact. The category test is structural: the licensed sector's fixed-cost back office becomes protocol infrastructure and transaction fees; settlement becomes minutes instead of days; pool balances become readable instead of asserted. And the audience is already there: conference attendees hold wallets and USDC natively — the distribution rail and the payment rail are the same object. Why Solana specifically: the covered community is Solana-native (Breakpoint: 8,000+ attendees per solana.com/breakpoint), the arbitration layer is Solana-native, and low-cost settlement is what makes a $20 product's unit economics possible. ## Market — events are GTM, mutuals are the market The destination market, sourced: | Fact | Number | Source | | ---------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------- | | The mutual sector today | $1.61T premiums, 4,700+ societies, 26.1% of global insurance — record year, outperforming the total market | ICMIF Global Mutual Market Share 2026 (2024 data) | | The unserved demand | Global nat-cat protection gap $424B (2025); only 49% of $220B in losses insured | Swiss Re sigma 1/2026 | | The next frontier | Microinsurance: 344M covered, 88% of the target uncovered; documented drivers are smartphones, automated underwriting, rapid claims, mobile money | Micro Insurance Network 2024 | | The capital that wants in | Alternative reinsurance capital $136B (+18% in 2025); cat bonds $60.7B outstanding, index +11.4%, spreads ~5–6.7% — and every seat gated (144A, QIB-only, ~$200k tickets) | Aon; Artemis; Swiss Re; IFB | | On-chain cover (the crypto corner) | >$3.4B stolen in 2025 vs ~$104M sector TVL, 84% in one player | Chainalysis; DeFiLlama | The same machine addresses every row: one risk per pool, no institutional charter at the pool level; surplus returns by rule instead of discretionary retention; the back office is the chain; mutuals can eventually stack into tranched capital. That is where this company is heading: anyone founding a mutual for anything, plus the microinsurance distributors and the capital staking the upper layers. Not only events: permissionless mutuals, eventually on-chain insurance in partnership with licensed carriers where the perimeter requires it. The GTM wedge — event-scoped pools — chosen for three reasons, none of them market size: (1) the cleanest initial legal surface — crypto-native members covering each other for a bounded window; (2) distribution mechanics. the event is its own juror pool; (3) measurability — every pool closes in weeks and publishes its numbers. Pilot unit economics (worked example, not TAM): 1,000 Standard members × $20 = $20,000 pool; 4 approved claims × $2,000 = $8,000 paid; $12,000 returns pro-rata ($12 each); pool dissolves. Zero claims: every cent returns. Numbers per policy §5/§10 — the demonstration that the mechanics clear at the smallest possible scale. The important market distinction is therefore **not whether events themselves are a trillion-dollar market**. They are the controlled entry point into a much larger behavior: communities already pool risk, formal mutuals already represent $1.61T of premiums, and many smaller or more specialized groups lack infrastructure between an informal cash pool and institutional insurance. ## Competition — what the alternatives do, and where each breaks Four players, four different jobs, none of them this exact architecture: - **Licensed insurers / event-insurance MGAs** — sell annual or per-event policies with fixed cost bases. A 3-day, $20, single-peril policy is difficult to support economically at this price point when US P&C spends ~26 cents of every premium dollar before a claim is paid (≈11.5¢ commissions, ≈2.4¢ taxes; Verisk/APCIA 2025, III). They demonstrate the scale economics Riprap is deliberately avoiding at the first wedge. Their surplus behavior shows the same shape: US P&C returned ~$1 per $24 kept in 2024 ($6.2B returned vs $148B net income), and State Farm's $5B dividend came after a 5-year drought — surplus distribution remains an institutional decision rather than a pool-level protocol rule. - **On-chain cover protocols (Nexus Mutual et al.)** — protocol-exploit cover for DeFi positions; ~$104M sector TVL, 84% concentrated in Nexus. Their operating record validates demand — people buy on-chain cover at 1–8%+ rate-on-line. Their architecture illustrates a different design center: protocol-centered protection rather than user-created, isolated mutuals. The incumbent's 2025 answer to scale was moving claims to a permissioned expert committee (NMPIP-261) — a meaningful architectural contrast with Riprap's member-juror design. The structural differences from the problem slide include governance dependencies, event scope, pool architecture, and permissioning. - **Medical crowdfunding (GoFundMe and peers)** — post-loss fundraising with platform fees: funded after the loss, no pre-committed mutual terms, no built-in peer adjudication, fee-loaded. The industrialized informal pool — adjacent to the same behavior Riprap formalizes, with different machinery. - **Prediction markets / oracles** — settle deterministic questions. The substrate at tier 0, not a direct competitor: everything below "a jury must judge" is theirs; everything above it is ours. The difference in one line: **pre-funded, adjudicated, dissolving pools for risks the fixed-cost sector cannot easily touch — built on an arbitration primitive that already exists, not a committee we promise to staff.** | Project | Failed/closed because… | | --------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Neptune Mutual** | **Wound down / closed its cover marketplaces** after insufficient growth. ([Spark][1]) | | **Cover Protocol** | **Suffered a ~$4M exploit and subsequently shut down.** | | **Solace** | **Ceased operations amid financial constraints.** | | **OpenCover** | **Not failed/closed** — actively expanding, including Solana coverage in 2026. ([OpenCover][2]) | | **Unslashed Finance** | **Not failed/closed** — continues operating, though at small scale. ([Spark][1]) | | **InsurAce** | **Not failed/closed** — continued operating as a DAO; activity/data tracking has declined. ([Spark][1]) | | **Bridge Mutual** | **No technically failed** — Limited due to scope. | | **Risk Harbor** | **No technically failed** — Limited due to scope. | ## Defensibility — the code is forkable; three assets are not 1. **The adjudication network.** Accord (useaccord.xyz) is live on devnet with the full dispute lifecycle — juror pools, stake-weighted draws, commit-reveal, appeal ladder, two-mint economics — and two consumer programs already built on it. Rebuilding this is the graveyard's entry fee, and the network effect can compound: juror liquidity, staked reputation, and published verdicts accumulate per dispute resolved. A fork gets the code, not automatically the juror network. 2. **The loss-data corpus.** Every pool emits public, machine-readable claims and verdict data for risks nobody has ever priced — event-scoped perils, community cohorts, adjudication outcomes. Actuarial advantage that cannot be bought, only earned, and it accrues per pool from pool #1. 3. **The team, as achievements rather than logos.** Operating decentralized treasuries and escrow since before it was a category: built the BitShares escrow and worker-proposal accounting system (a staked, adjudicated treasury paying out continuous proposals, 2017–2020); founding-adjacent at Cryptonomex/Steemit through the Steemit spin-off — the first person hired and paid directly by a blockchain; authored the ecosystem's core Python libraries (BitShares, Graphene, Peerplays, Steem); shipped Tributary, a recurring-payment protocol live on Solana mainnet; four exits (Steemit, Streemian, MakerDAO advisory, Cryptonomex); Solana Security #2 graduate; SuperteamDE; Colosseum Frontier winner (audit track) — the security posture for code that holds other people's money. Dr.-Ing. in communications engineering: Schelling-point adjudication is a signaling problem, and that is the day job we came from. Open-source honesty, pre-empted: the programs are open. What compounds is the network above them — the plan is to be the best operator on our own rails while the rails themselves win; the company is the first and best customer of its own infrastructure. The defensibility claim is intentionally cumulative rather than based on proprietary code: **jurors + dispute history + pool data + operating experience** become more valuable with every live pool. ## Distribution — the event is the channel B2B2C: one sale brings N wallets. The organizer/sponsor founds a pool and brings their attendee list; organizers already sell attach-products at checkout (badges, merch, upsells) and an offer this concrete attaches. Selling one organizer = acquiring a cohort, with the organizer's own comms as the funnel. The product distributes itself: members become paid jurors (earnings, not points), payouts and verdicts are public trust artifacts, and the pool page is engineered for group-chat screenshots — "chip in $20" is an impulse-priced ask. Urgency is native: deposits close when doors open. Crypto-native lanes, chosen for repeatability: the Solana conference circuit (each event is customer, channel, and juror pool at once — Breakpoint, then the 2027 calendar), Superteam DE/UK, CT, the foundation relationships. No paid web2 acquisition, no airdrop; the pool's own economics are the incentive. The KPI ladder that defines PMF: waitlist → join rate per event → renewal at the next event → **organizer-initiated pools** (a sponsor shows up without us). That last one is the signal the wedge is working; the take-rate exists to share it, a revenue-share parameter for organizers activated with the second sponsor. Where distribution goes at scale: the same pitch to communities, associations, and microinsurance distributors, whose documented growth drivers (smartphones, automated underwriting, rapid claims, mobile money) map one-for-one onto the protocol's native properties. Events prove the machine; the mutual economy adopts it. ## Business model — revenue first, token as warrant Today (pilot): zero protocol take. Pool #1 exists to produce public numbers, not revenue. The model, activation-laddered: 1. **Take-rate on pools** — a protocol share of pool surplus, switched on with the second pool; doubles as the organizer revenue-share. Working assumption: a single-digit share of positive surplus, captured at the pool layer. 2. **Operator fees** — running flagship pools and deployments for sponsors who want the product without the operations. 3. **Infrastructure capture at the destination** — when anyone can launch a mutual on the rails, the protocol's share extends to pools we do not operate. The expansion story, not the near-term revenue line. Token stance — business first, token as warrant: v1 runs on USDC end to end — entry fees, juror stake, juror fees, payouts — no product token, no governance theater. The raise carries a bounded token warrant over the one proposed future role: staked reserve capital earning transparent protection yield — the asset class the $136B alternative-capital market already pays banks for access to, with a $200k ticket and quarterly reporting, opened here to any wallet size with a live vault instead. Bounded means: a fixed share of any future supply, at a struck price, with the terms published before the round opens — no open-ended claim on the network. The warrant is the hardest-negotiated term in the round: a seemingly attractive equity cap becomes expensive if the warrant gives away a meaningful chunk of the future network. Separately, the preferred eventual structure is a token-only raise via MetaDAO, moving all value into the DAO and making the equity meaningless — a future round's decision, not this one's. ## The ask Raising $700k on a post-money SAFE + a bounded token warrant (terms published before the round opens). Hard/soft range $600k–800k; working valuation range $6–8M post-money; opening ask $7M post-money cap — 10% of the company. Runway: 18 months. Primary milestone: organizer-initiated pools. Pre-raise, not anchored to a minimum. The next 6–12 months turn "we think this is a huge new category" into "people are using it, sponsors are paying or committing, here is the economic activity" — that transition is the next valuation step, and it is what this round funds. The financing narrative — capital → de-risk → prove → unlock organizer-initiated pools: 1. **Security** — audit the arbitration layer and the pool/hanse programs (the mainnet-capital gate). 2. **Product** — hanse orchestrator → SDK → end-to-end suite, per the frozen spec. 3. **Proof** — the Blade Pool operational pilot at Breakpoint, results published. 4. **Legal** — the structure for broader membership (cover terms, jurisdiction posture). 5. **Growth** — convert pilot traction into organizer-initiated pools. 6. **Runway** — hold the team through that milestone. The angel's question, answered: "What does my $100k actually get you to?" The answer is not "18 months." It gets us from an audited working product and an operational pilot to a repeatable network of organizer-initiated pools. Milestones the money buys: devnet e2e green (claim → appeal → settle → pull) → mainnet pilot live at Breakpoint → published pool report (join rate, claims, verdicts, pro-rata returns) → first organizer-initiated pool → take-rate switched on for the pools that follow. The sequencing matters: the raise is not funding a speculative product concept. The core pool machinery already exists, the arbitration primitive already exists on devnet, and the payment rail already exists on mainnet. The capital is funding the transition from **working components to audited, integrated, measured, repeatable mutuals**. ## Objections — prepared, not improvised - **"Is this regulated insurance?"** It is a discretionary mutual — member-funded cover, the established form for members covering each other. The event wedge is the cleanest legal entry surface, not a claimed zero; expansion crosses perimeters with licenses or licensed partners. - **"The numbers are toys — $20 × 1,000 people?"** Correct, deliberately. The pilot is a measurement instrument for unit economics and adjudication quality at the smallest scale. We are not raising on event-pool revenue; we are raising on the machine the events prove. - **"Why not Nexus / an insurer / GoFundMe?"** Three different jobs. Nexus proves demand and demonstrates a different architectural tradeoff; insurers demonstrate what institutional fixed costs look like; crowdfunding demonstrates the post-hoc behavior Riprap replaces with pre-funded, rule-bound pools. - **"Would financially interested members adjudicate honestly?"** Jurors stake and lose capital for voting against the evident truth; the draw is random at dispute time so panels cannot be groomed; appeals re-examine with larger juries; the claimant pre-pays juror fees so frivolous filings are priced out. Honest limit: the pilot is designed to validate performance under adversarial load, and includes a public attack bounty (file fraudulent claims; the jury denies them; a landed one pays the finder). - **"Web2 could build this app."** It can build the interface; the architectural challenge is custody-free pooling, non-staff adjudication, and credible dissolution. The $20 price point is designed around eliminating the company-level fixed costs that make tiny pools difficult. - **"Why Solana?"** The covered community, the arbitration layer, and the cost floor are all Solana-native. - **"What stops a funded team from copying you?"** They get the code, but not automatically the jurors, the accumulated claims data, the dispute history, or the team's treasury-operating scar tissue. ## The hard questions — straight answers The four questions every diligence conversation reaches — the cleaned answers behind the appendix slide; the verbatim slide copy (questions and answers, typos included) sits in the deck section above (added 2026-09-18): - **Can you legally do this?** The mutual is deliberately limited in scope and time as the first legal surface. Regulations are reviewed step by step as the product expands. - **Can strangers adjudicate claims?** Adjudication is the central empirical question. The mechanism is already defined: juror draws, stake, commit-reveal, appeals and slashing. Optimal parameters are set case by case; they are defined for the pilot, and the metric set — turnout, time to verdict, appeal and reversal rates, cost per claim — publishes from Blade Pool onward. - **Why the hardest claims first?** Blade Pool is the cheapest place to find adjudication failures: capped payouts ($1k–4k), tiny stakes ($10–40), bounded lifetime, one venue. - **Who builds the company?** Started solo, became a real business. None of this would've happened without mtnDAO. On-chain insurance has been on our minds for half a decade. ## Build status — honest ledger (2026-09) - Pool program (custody, two doors, pro-rata liquidation): **built** — LiteSVM suite green. - Arbitration layer (Accord: juror pools, commit-reveal, appeals): **live on devnet**, full dispute lifecycle; two consumer programs built (curated list, N-party escrow). - Event-mutual orchestrator (hanse: tiers, claims, settlement ratio): **planned into implementation** — spec grilled and frozen; full bean tree cut. - Recurring-payment rail (Tributary): **live on Solana mainnet** — dependency for recurring contributions later, not needed for one-time event pools. - First pool (Blade Pool @ Breakpoint 2026): landing live, waitlist open; pool launches with the event (Nov 15–17, London). Clarification: The Pool is not created by the organizers of the conference but us as 3rd party! Not claimed: audits, mainnet capital on the arbitration layer, production dispute volume, revenue. Audits gate mainnet capital — that is the stated next spend, not hand-waving. The status is intentionally staged: the foundation is built, the integration is next, and the pilot is the controlled environment in which the remaining economic and adjudication parameters become measurable. ## Legal posture — one paragraph The product is a discretionary mutual — member-funded cover, with claims determined under the mutual's pre-committed terms and adjudication mechanism. The event wedge is chosen first because it is the cleanest initial surface: crypto-native members, covering each other, for a bounded window, with a narrowly defined pool. It is not presented as a claim of “no license required.” The build order runs from the narrowest initial surface outward; wherever the product crosses into regulated lines, the license is taken or a licensed carrier partnered with. The appeal is granularity, transparency, cost structure, and composability — not regulatory avoidance. ## Numbers ledger — every number above, with its source | Number | Supports | Source | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------- | | $1.61T mutual premiums; 4,700+ societies; 26.1% global share; record year | The destination market | ICMIF 2026 | | ~26¢ distribution+admin per US P&C premium dollar (≈11.5¢ commissions, ≈2.4¢ taxes) | Why $20 products cannot exist with a company | Verisk/APCIA 2025; III | | ~$1 back per $24 kept ($6.2B returned vs $148B net income); State Farm's $5B dividend after a 5-year drought | Surplus-by-rule vs surplus-by-favor | Verisk/APCIA; State Farm | | $424B protection gap; 49% of $220B losses insured | Unserved demand | Swiss Re sigma 1/2026 | | 344M covered / 88% uncovered; four digital drivers | Microinsurance frontier | Micro Insurance Network 2024 | | $136B alt capital (+18%); cat bonds $60.7B, +11.4% index, ~5–6.7% spreads, QIB-only ~$200k tickets | Protection yield is wanted and gated | Aon; Artemis; IFB | | >$3.4B stolen 2025; ~$104M on-chain cover TVL; 84% Nexus; 1–8%+ rate-on-line; NMPIP-261 committee | Crypto corner: demand vs machinery | Chainalysis; DeFiLlama; Nexus v3 review | | Fraud ~10% of US P&C incurred losses | Adjudication economics matter | CAIF/NAIC | | Breakpoint 8,000+ attendees | Pilot cohort scale | solana.com/breakpoint (attributed) | | Pilot tiers $10/$20/$40 → $1k/$2k/$4k; worked example | Unit economics | Policy §5/§10 | | Nexus Mutual $5.7M cover fees '25, $2.7M raised ever (no VC), $1B+ purchased '25; OpenCover $4.6M seed '22–23, $141.6M protected '25 | On-chain cover competitors' scale | Market scan (Q&A notes) | | $16.3B Solana stablecoin supply Q2 2026 vs $11B a year earlier; Visa settling USDC since late 2025; Western Union launching USDPT in 2026 | Why now — settlement layer depth | Founder's market brief 2026-09-18 (named source pending) | ## Vocabulary note On stage and in product copy: mutual, pool, cover, contribution, member, payout, surplus, tier, claims window, juror, drawn, ruling, two exit doors, dissolve. Not used for this product: insurance, insurer, policy, premium, indemnity, underwriting, policyholder (fine when describing the traditional market). The 2026-09-17/18 deck headline re-stages ("DeFi broke finance. Insurance is next.", "Insurance is a slow, expensive monolith.", "on-chain rails for insurance contracts", "Same insurance economics…", "conventional insurances") are a deliberate, author-called exception at the headline layer only; the vision slide's comparison-table labels "traditional insurance" / "web3 insurance" ride on the same call. Tone law: deadpan-honest — numbers over adjectives, every number sourced, the peril named plainly and never dramatized. The vocabulary distinction is deliberate: **the company can use “insurance” to explain the market it is entering and the architecture it is replacing, while “mutual” describes what Riprap itself is building.** ## Contact Dr.-Ing. Fabian Schuh, founder — [fabian@chainsquad.com](mailto:fabian@chainsquad.com) · x.com/@xer0c. Surfaces: riprap.xyz (the platform) · useaccord.xyz (the arbitration layer) · @riprapxyz (the build log).