The insurance industry runs on data it cannot reliably share. US property and casualty carriers wrote more than $1.1 trillion in direct written premium during 2025. Yet the risk data behind those policies still travels by spreadsheet and email. The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative wants to change that, and it picked Hedera as the rail.
RiskStream joined the Hedera Council as a strategic partner on June 9, 2026. That seat builds on existing work with Hashgraph on an interoperable property risk and resilience solution. Speaking with Ryan Solomon, RiskStream President Pat Schmid walked through what the architecture actually does.
Insurance Still Moves Risk Data by Spreadsheet
Schmid started with the identifier problem. A commercial property often carries no universal identifier at all. Consequently, brokers, carriers, and data providers discuss the same building without confirming they mean the same building. Addresses vary between systems, so reconciliation eats hours on every submission.
The industry calls that underwriting file COPE data. The acronym covers construction, occupancy, protection, and exposure. Each party keeps its own copy, and those copies drift apart over time. Meanwhile, perils keep shifting. Wildfire, flood, and severe convective storms now reprice risk faster than manual workflows can track.
Residential exposure compounds the problem. A homeowner can clear brush and lower their own wildfire risk. However, that work stays invisible if neighbors do nothing. Community mitigation only shows up in pricing when someone aggregates it, and today nobody does.
Hedera Council welcomes The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative as a Strategic Partner, alongside new Community Partners @EQTYLab, @hgraph, @KabilaApp, and @xenitravel.
— Hedera (@hedera) June 9, 2026
These organizations bring expertise across insurance, Web3 data infrastructure, AI governance, tokenized…
Why No Single Carrier Could Fix It
Schmid argued the problem survived for a structural reason. No individual company holds the neutrality to convene direct competitors around shared infrastructure. RiskStream exists to fill exactly that gap. Today it is the property and casualty insurance industry’s largest not-for-profit emerging technology consortium.
The Institutes traces back to 1909 and Wharton School insurance academics. Today the nonprofit educates more than 100,000 insurance professionals each year, Schmid said. Its Board of Trustees founded RiskStream to explore how technology can better connect insurance companies. The group also targets multiparty business process problems the industry could not tackle alone.
More than 30 carrier, broker, and reinsurer members now shape its governance through working groups and advisory committees. Notably, the Hedera relationship splits responsibility along that same line. RiskStream owns governance and data standards, while Hashgraph owns the technical rails.
The Hybrid Model: Hedera Public, HashSphere Private
Schmid compared the design to a VIN for a building, except public and interoperable. The system assigns each commercial and residential property a persistent, public token on Hedera. That token carries latitude, longitude, and other attributes nobody minds exposing. Anyone querying that property returns the same identifier.
Sensitive material lives elsewhere. COPE data and risk metadata sit on HashSphere, Hashgraph’s permissioned ledger. Carriers, brokers, and data providers exchange that information under access controls.
| Layer | Runs On | What Lives There | Access |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public identity | Hedera | Persistent property token, coordinates, non-sensitive attributes | Open, interoperable |
| Private data | HashSphere | COPE data, risk and mitigation records | Permissioned participants |
| Governance | RiskStream | Standards, access rules, requirements | 30+ member firms |
The split matters because neither layer works alone. A fully private ledger cannot produce an identifier that travels between rival firms. A fully public ledger cannot hold underwriting detail. “HashSphere was built to remove the barriers that have historically hindered adoption of public blockchain solutions by regulated industries,” said Kurt Bierbower, chief revenue officer at Hashgraph.
What a Persistent Property Token Changes
Carriers gain faster underwriting against a verified record instead of a rebuilt one. Brokers stop assembling submissions from scratch for every market. Reinsurers see the largest shift, though. Treaty pricing today runs on stale, aggregated data.
Schmid framed the reinsurance gap as a transparency problem. Investors in any pooled instrument struggle to price what they cannot see inside. Reinsurers face a version of that same limitation on treaties. Token level detail would let them price what a treaty actually contains.
Data providers also gain a market. Wildfire modelers and mitigation verifiers currently struggle to attach their output to a specific property. A persistent identifier gives them somewhere to write.
Asset Token, Then Policy Token, Then Claim Token
The property token is only the first layer. Schmid framed the asset token as the parent record for risk that exists whether or not coverage does. A policy would then attach as a child token beneath it.
That structure targets a mundane but expensive problem: proving coverage exists. Verifying insurance remains slow and manual across auto, mortgage, and commercial transactions. A child policy token would make verification checkable rather than phoned in. Claims would follow as a third token linked to the same asset.
Schmid, trained as an economist, was measured about the downstream effect. Costs sunk into inefficiency can come out of the system over time, he said. However, he noted many factors drive pricing at the state level.
Pilot Next, and a Template for Other Regulated Industries
RiskStream is now moving from proof of concept into a pilot phase. Carriers and brokers come first, with third-party data partners joining later. Beyond property, Schmid said the consortium is also tokenizing surety bonds and working on auto claims.
The broader argument is about pattern, not property. Any fragmented, regulated industry needs multiple parties to trust the same underlying facts. Schmid named energy, financial services, and healthcare as sectors facing the same problem. Neutral governance plus hybrid public and private infrastructure gives those sectors a template to copy.
The pilot will test the model. Industry infrastructure projects have stalled before, usually when participants could not see how the technology or the rules worked. RiskStream is betting that owning both answers is the difference.
