(BlockBar) World’s second-largest insurance broker by revenues Aon has lined up a panel of insurers. The insurers are to provide cryptocurrency coverage for clients of Metaco which is a digital asset custody technology firm. The insurers mostly European and none of them were named. The insurers will offer a crime insurance product to institutions using Metaco’s SILO solution for so-called hot and cold, which are online and offline, wallets. Aon did not disclose the dollar amount of coverage available.
Aon did tell that the policies cover losses on everything from third-party hacks of hot wallets connected to the internet to natural disasters destroying the private keys kept offline in cold storage. This is Aon’s latest partnership with a crypto custody player.It is worth paying attention to that insurance is scarce for crypto held at custodians or exchanges and especially with hot wallets. The insurance industry has slowly but steadily responded to demand by starting with cover for cold storage.
To be noted, this demand is indirectly driven by banks and other financial institutions which are highly interested in holding digital assets. According to the financial institutions practice leader at Aon Risk Solutions, Jacqueline Quintal,“Anyone who is speaking with institutions on the custody side or even from a trading perspective often finds themselves in the middle of a vendor management process that those firms put everybody through, and with that comes insurance requirements.”
Metaco is part-owned by the telecom provider Swisscom, the national postal service which is based in Lausanne, Switzerland. The company focuses on providing custody tools to crypto-curious institutions. To be noted, Metaco is one of the firms that make up the Custodigit partnership underpinning German securities exchange Deutsche Börse’s digital asset pilot in Switzerland.
According to the CEO and co-founder of the Metaco Adrien Treccan, the company expects to work with pure crypto exchanges. Treccani said,“We wanted to provide a framework under which any of the custodians relying on SILO would be almost able to get an insurance cover out of the box, at least to have all of the green light for the technology components of the insured.”
Mayan MV is a passionate writer and cryptocurrency enthusiast. He currently serves as marketing strategist and contributor at BlockBar, based in Singapore. Mayan has started his career in blockchain technology about five years ago, and he has also written over a hundred articles that span across various fields.
