NEO Smart Contract for Drought-Based Insurance

Agriculture insurance has developed across emerging economies in South East Asia (SEA). New products are introduced to farmers to lessen financial losses of crops with low commercialised. Drought-based crop insurance has launched in some SEA countries to protect farmers from extreme weather events. The evaluation process for insurance value coverage is costly and lengthy. Farmer participation in crop insurance schemes, hence, remains low. Additionally, while dealing with extreme events, stated-owned irrigation water companies with complex bureaucratic systems delay decisions. This adds a heavy toll on farmers’ shoulders when facing drought. To solve these problems, a blockchain-based smart contract linking with oracle services to ensure asymmetric information is proposed to reduce the evaluation costs and lengthy process of evaluating compensation is a. Currently, building smart contract that oracles can push required information to is not used in the case of agricultural insurance. Hence, we proposed a blockchain-based smart contract framework that applies to weather-based index insurance. We selected NEO for our experiment due to its easy access tokens. While developing a smart contract on NEO, we designed 5 functions that can be triggered if certain conditions are met and built a virtual oracles server. This initial experiment promised a scalable and trusted platform that can lessen farmers’ potential damages and reduce their vulnerability.