Lemonade partners with blockchain bigwigs to combat climate change

The coalition will release a decentralized application to help farmers make or receive payments using crypto.

Insurance company Lemonade has partnered with prominent blockchain companies to form the Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition (L3C) decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to protect farmers from climate change by offering blockchain-based insurance. 

The insurance firm founded Lemonade Foundation, a nonprofit focused on creating social and environmental change with the use of blockchain-enabled technologies. The foundation will work closely with members of the L3C including Chainlink, Avalance, DAOstack, Etherisc, Hannover Re, Pula and Tomorrow.io.

The climate insurance will take the form of a decentralized application (DApp) on the Avalanche platform. The DApp will also enable farmers to make and receive payments using crypto or with their local currencies. According to the announcement, the DApp will be rolled out to Africa in 2022.

Daniel Schreiber, director at the Lemonade Foundation, said that the foundation was created to build technologies that are exponentially impactful. With this, they “expect to harness the communal and decentralized aspects of web3 and real-time weather data to deliver affordable and instantaneous climate insurance to the people who need it most,” said Schreiber.

The move is expected to impact around 300 million farmers in Africa. Rose Goslinga, co-founder of Pula, a Kenya-based insurance tech firm says that “the majority face real climate risks to their livelihoods, as traditional, indemnity-based insurance is often unaffordable or unavailable to them.” Goslinga notes that an on-chain solution will have a scalable positive impact on the region.

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Chainlink, a founding member of L3C, also plans to contribute its team and tech to the cause. “We plan to make the Chainlink team and platform available to L3C in an effort to protect the millions of farmers who depend on what they grow from the devastation of climate change,” said Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink.

Meanwhile, a report shows that crypto users in Africa increased by 2,500 percent in 2021. Data shown by KuCoin exchange notes that crypto transactions based on the region grew significantly in 2021. Because of this, the region holds around 2.8% of the global trading volume.