# Blockchain and Smart Contracts for Insurance: Is the Technology Nature Enough?
## 5 Conclusions
Finally, public blockchains could be useful to manage (automatic) payments with existing cryptocurrencies, or when there is the need to provide trust (using an unmodifiable ledger) between parties. Concerning question 3, \"Is blockchain technology mature enough for insurance?\", while we believe that blockchain is a tremendous invention that could have an impact similar to the World Wide Web in the 90s, we also think that this technology still needs several improvements before becomingmainstream. The reasons behind this statement are various: first of all, a current limitation of existing (public) blockchains is scalability. In fact, the number of transactions per second is low, and the network frequently suffers congestions. In a pay-per-use insurance scenario, these facts would translate into long waiting times before the desired policy cover is actually activated (and, what if an accident occurs while the transaction activating a cover was waiting for validation?). Second, a winning blockchain is still missing. That means that a company could develop an application exploiting a given blockchain, and discover after few years that the chosen blockchain is no longer supported by the wider network. Using a public blockchain supported by few nodes could increase the risk of attacks (as few nodes could control the majority of the network). Third, the interaction with the blockchain is still complex for the \"average user\". Mastering the concepts of wallet, transaction, mining, etc. requires some technical background. At the same time, Bitcoin has frequently been associated with a pyramid scheme or a fraud. As a consequence, there is still a lot of misinformation on blockchain, and people could still prefer \"traditional\" applications rather than decentralized ones. Furthermore, cryptocurrency volatility (which sometimes is driven by media news) could scare the potential users of decentralized applications. Finally, the resources and best practices to develop a free-of-bugs smart contract are still insufficient. Smart contracts frequently experience attacks, in some cases with disastrous consequences [70]. This aspect could especially threaten peer-to-peer insurances, which would widely rely on smart contracts for their governance. For the above reasons, we do not expect blockchain-based insurance applications to appear in the very near future. It must be said, though, that the blockchain community is devoting great efforts to improving the above weaknesses. Regarding scalability, Lightning Network (for Bitcoin) [71] and Raiden Network (for Ethereum) [72] are currently under development. Both solutions are investigating how to mix online and offline transactions, in order to reduce mining costs and time. Concerning easing the interaction with the blockchain, some applications that let users easily interact with blockchain-based applications using their browsers or mobile phones are currently under development [65; 66]. Concerning smart contracts security, bug bounties programs are more and more frequent, and a wide community of blockchain white hat hackers is currently being created [73]. Once the above initiatives are successful, blockchain technology could be gradually inserted in everyday lives. In the meantime, insurance companies are strongly suggested to start investigating it, by acquiring the required competencies, and by creating some prototype solutions. Such prototypes could be useful to evaluate how existing processes would be influenced and to what extent this technology would be accepted by the staff or by customers. What is clear already is that blockchain is bringing a radical transformation to the way we act and think, and we all should be prepared for this change. The paper was prepared by all the five authors, which were involved in a study of Blockchain technology in the Insurance Sector. All the authors equally contributed to the manuscript.