In a blog post this week, billionaire investor, Shark Tank star and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban wrote that “banks should be scared” of the superior yield offered by open-source DeFi protocols like Aave. As more decentralized services lead to more advanced use cases for hybrid smart contracts, DeFi’s TVL continues to rise in what Aave’s founder and CEO, Stani Kulechov, recently described as a “cycle of efficiency” during a Clubhouse fireside chat with Chainlink’s Co-founder, Sergey Nazarov.
“DeFi is very small still, but the reason we’re growing so fast is because there are so few boundaries on what you can do. When you have an idea, there’s no one stopping you. All of these new processes being built on top of Chainlink and Aave – that’s why both are growing so fast,” Kulechov said.
On the heels of DeFi’s exponential growth is the expansion of decentralized insurance, which Nazarov expects to be the next industry revolutionized by hybrid smart contracts. Beyond backing several DeFi projects, Cuban recently became a strategic advisor for Chainlink Spring Hackathon winner Vulcan, a blockchain-based derivatives marketplace that allows anyone to insure themselves against the weather.
Cuban’s support of Chainlink-powered decentralized insurance continues with yesterday’s announcement that he will invest in and become a strategic advisor for dClimate, the first decentralized marketplace for weather and climate data, which runs on Chainlink’s decentralized oracle networks (DONs). Designed to unite and simplify the fractured, opaque climate data market, dClimate stems from the founders of Arbol, a parametric weather insurance platform, which also leverages Chainlink oracles.
In addition to providing essential data to insurtech platforms like Arbol (a dClimate anchor client), Arbol’s CEO, Sid Jha, told Chainlink Today “every business or entity that is financially exposed to weather risk, especially those that are located in areas that are prone to disasters (Florida for hurricanes, California for wildfires) need and can use platforms like dClimate to save resources and lives.”
Users who need reliable, immutable, accessible weather and climate data include construction companies, logistics companies, governments, outdoor event planners, sports teams and more. “From insurance products that payout based on rainfall data to tools that allow ESG programs to measure carbon footprint, dClimate can be the go-to platform for every organization that uses or builds with climate data,” Cuban said in the announcement.
“Mark fundamentally understands the potential that smart contracts and blockchain have to disrupt key industries like data and insurance,” Jha told Chainlink Today. “His invaluable expertise and insights will be a critical asset to our team as we aim to build a platform that leverages oracles and smart contracts to help businesses around the world build climate resilience and proactively plan for weather disasters in a changing world.”