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While the global insurance industry is still slowly iterating within the traditional framework, a revolution triggered by cryptocurrency is quietly rewriting century-old insurance rules. In 2025, Yunfeng Financial, owned by Jack Ma, will push the concept of "cryptocurrency + insurance" into reality with a series of precise moves, marking the insurance industry officially entering the 3.0 era.  Game-breaker Anthea: The value of the world’s first ETH life insurance license The core of this change began with a Bermuda insurance company called Anthea. In June this year, Anthea obtained the world's first "ETH-denominated life insurance" compliance license issued by the Bermuda Monetary Authority, pioneering cryptocurrency insurance. Anthea’s subversiveness is reflected in three dimensions: Scarcity of licenses: The Bermuda Monetary Authority's "Innovative Long-Term Insurance License" (Class ILT) is the world's first regulatory sandbox for crypto asset insurance. This means that Anthea can price, underwrite and settle claims in mainstream cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum under a compliance framework, solving the compliance pain points that have long plagued crypto asset holders. Revolutionary product: Anthea launches the world’s first Ethereum-denominated life insurance. Users can directly use cryptocurrencies such as ETH to purchase insurance policies, and the insurance amount, premium, and claims are all settled in ETH. This not only avoids the cumbersome process of "selling currency → exchanging legal currency → insuring" in traditional insurance, but also achieves "coin-based" wealth preservation. Advanced technology: Through smart contracts, the entire process of on-chain operations is realized, from insurance application, underwriting to claims settlement, fully automated. Partnerships with Chainlink and Fireblocks ensure real-time price data and asset security, while smart contracts can automatically complete claims within 48 hours upon receipt of a death certificate and wallet signature. Jack Ma’s Lightning Layout: From YF Life Insurance to Crypto Ecosystem Yunfeng Financial’s series of actions in 2025 demonstrate amazing strategic coordination and execution speed: On September 1, we strategically cooperated with Ant Digital to invest in the Pharos public chain to build RWA financial infrastructure. On September 2, US$44 million was spent to purchase 10,000 Ethereums as the company’s reserve assets.； In mid-September, Yunfeng Securities was approved for virtual asset trading service qualifications； On September 17, the first RWA project was completed, realizing real-world assets on the chain.； On October 2, it announced a strategic investment in Anthea, entering the cryptocurrency insurance track.  This closely connected layout outlines a clear strategic map: using YF Life as the carrier and Yunfeng Financial as the capital platform, we will build a complete crypto-financial ecosystem covering public chains, transactions, asset tokenization and insurance services.  YF Life plays a key role in this strategy. The 2025 interim results show that the annualized premium of Wantong's new business reached HK$2.222 billion, a year-on-year increase of 107%, and has become the profit pillar of Yunfeng Financial. But what Jack Ma values is not only the existing business, but also the value of its license, customer base and distribution network - these are the ready-made infrastructure for implementing the "cryptocurrency + insurance" model. Dismantling of ETH life insurance products: When insurance meets currency-based thinking Anthea’s ETH life insurance product design is completely based on the thinking model of crypto-native users:  Take a 30-year-old male who pays 10 ETH in lump sum and has a 20-year policy as an example:
This design accurately hits the three major pain points of crypto asset holders: Tax planning: The United States, Japan and other countries tax the death transfer of crypto assets as high as 40%, while life insurance claims are usually tax-free； Private key security: According to Chainalysis statistics, 20% of circulating Bitcoins have been permanently locked due to the loss of private keys.； Volatility management: Through option/futures hedging, the risk of currency price decline is packaged into the actuarial model. Technology Reconstruction Insurance: Dimensionality Reduction of Smart Contracts The core competitiveness of the Anthea model comes from the reconstruction of traditional insurance by blockchain technology: Reconstruction of the underwriting process: Traditional insurance relies on manual review and paper materials, and the process can take several weeks. Anthea's on-chain underwriting automatically verifies users' on-chain assets and transaction history through smart contracts, achieving "second-level underwriting" and reducing the cost to less than one-tenth of the traditional model. Risk management revolution: The non-tamperability of blockchain makes policy information and claims records traceable throughout the entire process, fundamentally eliminating insurance fraud. When a user's insurance history is all uploaded to the chain, "fraudulent insurance" will become a historical concept. Improved capital efficiency: Anthea puts reserves into the chain for pledge, and the annualized return reaches 4-6%, while the bond account return of traditional insurance companies is only about 2%. This difference in benefits will ultimately be reflected in product competitiveness and premium pricing. Market fundamentals and regulatory breakthroughs Anthea chooses ETH as the basis for pricing due to its solid market foundation: Glassnode data shows that the number of addresses holding ≥1 ETH has exceeded 2.8 million. The average age of these "atypical savers" is 32 years old. Their per capita legal currency financial assets are less than US$80,000, but they own digital assets with an average value of US$45,000. Traditional life insurance is difficult to serve this group of newly wealthy people, and Anthea's "directly receive ETH and pay ETH" model fits their needs. At the regulatory level, Bermuda's "regulatory sandbox" provides space for innovation. Anthea has signed side-linking agreements with two London reinsurance companies to transfer excess risks out in layers, ensuring that claims can be paid out rigidly even if the price of ETH fluctuates significantly. Industry Impact and Future Scenarios The Anthea model has a triple impact on the traditional insurance industry: Product dimension: ETH pricing makes "anti-inflation" the default attribute of insurance, dwarfing traditional 2% dividend insurance； Channel dimension: direct payment on the chain, wallet as account, cutting off the middle layer of the bank, compressing the commission rate from 30% to 8%； Asset dimension: Insurance funds flow directly into the DeFi field to obtain higher returns, and "premiums" are transformed from costs into interest-earning assets. The future insurance industry will present three major trends: Generalization of insurance subject matter: from human life and property to data assets, digital identity, and smart contract permissions； Automation of the insurance process: Parametric insurance has become mainstream. Claims will be automatically settled when conditions are met, without the need to apply for review.； Deintermediation of insurance organizations: Mutual insurance in the form of DAOs rises, and insurance companies transform into technical service providers. Investment Enlightenment and Risk Warning ETH life insurance is suitable for three types of people:
But before participating, you need to ask yourself three questions:
Conclusion: The Awakening Era of the Insurance Industry From cargo mortgages to fire insurance, to automobile insurance and aviation insurance, every innovation in the insurance industry is accompanied by the rise of new asset classes. Today, cryptocurrency, as the fastest growing asset class in the 21st century, finally has insurance services to match. Jack Ma's move is not just a simple product innovation, but a complete reconstruction of the "asset-supervision-contract" relationship in the insurance industry. While most insurance companies are still discussing "whether to go on the chain", Wantong has already answered the question of "how to survive on the chain". The insurance industry is experiencing its awakening. The speed of this change will be faster than anyone imagined. For practitioners, the only question is: Are you prepared to be the one flipping the table, or are you going to be the one who is about to take the cutlery off the table? |
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