Developing NEO Smart Contract for Weather-Based Insurance

Abstract

Weather-based insurance has been developed across emerging economies in many countries. In several Southeast Asia (SEA) countries, weather-based insurance has been released to protect fishermen from the natural events or extreme weather. The value of insurance coverage is obtained from an expensive and lengthy process, especially when facing an extreme weather condition such as sea storm. This adds a heavy toll on fisherman's shoulders when facing the natural conditions. To solve these problems, which is to reduce evaluation costs, blockchain-based smart contracts are used ensure easier asymmetric information. We proposed a blockchain-based smart contract framework that applies to weather-based index insurance. We chose Docker Container and Neo blockchain platform for our experiment due to its easy access tokens from neo-python with a private network. In this experiment we developed a smart contract implementation on Neo. We defined 6 (six) functions that can be triggered if certain conditions are met from an external data application program interface (API). In our experiment of blockchain implementation using Neo, we found that Neo is scalable and trusted and as well having a low memory consumption that could be running in a low specification machine. The deployment of a blockchain based system is feasible to be conducted using Neo platform.