Hashgraph, the organization driving the development of the Hedera network, has partnered with The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative. The collaboration between the tech firm and the insurance industry’s largest emerging technology consortium aims to develop an interoperable property risk and resilience portal.
The new solution is designed to transform how commercial and residential property risk data is shared, verified, and utilized across the entire insurance sector. By establishing a single, trusted source of truth for property and risk data, the portal will help insurers, brokers, and reinsurers reduce fragmentation, improve data accuracy, and significantly streamline underwriting.
Solving a trillion-dollar data problem
According to data from S&P Global, the United States property and casualty insurance market now exceeds $1trillion in direct annual premiums. This massive figure includes approximately $169billion in homeowners premiums and $103billion in commercial property premiums.
Despite the vast scale of risk underwritten across the industry, insurers face persistent challenges:
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A heavy reliance on a fragmented mix of manual forms, legacy systems, and third-party data sources.
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Inconsistent data quality and operational inefficiencies that negatively affect underwriting accuracy and pricing.
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Growing perils, including natural catastrophes, that are actively increasing the complexity and volatility of risk.
Pat Schmid, president of The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative, highlighted the severe inefficiencies in current workflows.
“The process of gathering and sharing data for insurance placement and underwriting today is tedious, highly manual, and inefficient,” Schmid stated. “There are multiple parties within the insurance experience (carriers, brokers, reinsurers, data providers, and so on) that routinely duplicate the same work, with no standardized way to verify, track, or maintain this critical data over time.”
Schmid noted that the vision for the partnership is to tokenize risk assets, creating a persistent, unique identifier that serves as a shared data foundation for the industry. “Property is the perfect place to start,” he added.
A hybrid distributed ledger approach
To build this shared foundation, RiskStream will leverage a hybrid distributed ledger model. This approach combines HashSphere—Hashgraph’s private, permissioned ledger—with the Hedera public network.
This hybrid structure enables sensitive data to be securely managed within a private environment while simultaneously anchoring key records to a public ledger via a token. Ultimately, this improves risk tracking, trust, and interoperability related to the underlying asset without sacrificing data privacy. Furthermore, RiskStream is implementing an EVM-based real-world asset (RWA) approach, which enables more flexible financial and data models through the use of smart contracts.
Kurt Bierbower, chief revenue officer at Hashgraph, emphasized the practical value of this technological architecture.
“HashSphere was built to remove the barriers that have historically hindered adoption of public blockchain solutions by regulated industries,” Bierbower explained. “This partnership demonstrates how hybrid models can unlock real-world use cases at scale. By tokenizing property and risk data, we’re creating a shared foundation of trust that accelerates underwriting and modernizes how risk is evaluated.”
While the initial partnership focuses specifically on tokenizing commercial and residential properties, the organizations plan to eventually expand their data tokenization efforts to other lines of insurance and additional operational processes.