Bermuda-Licensed Relm Insurance Unveils Suite of Crypto Risk Products

• Relm Insurance, regulated by the Bermuda Monetary Authority, is offering a five-product suite of crypto cover offerings.
• As well as cyber and wallet custody cover, Relm is providing professional liability insurance for crypto trading, as well as cover for losses relating to staking assets on the Ethereum blockchain.

Relm Insurance, a specialty insurance carrier regulated by the Bermuda Monetary Authority, has unveiled a new suite of products covering a range of cryptocurrency-related risks, from wallets to investment management.

Relm, which also provides insurance to emerging industries like cannabis and psychedelics, has created a five-part offering for digital asset risks, such as cyber cover, crime coverage for holding crypto in hot wallets (connected to the internet), or covering investment managers of digital assets funds. In addition, there are more esoteric cover options like reimbursement for losses associated with staking Ethereum, where a participant can have their assets “slashed” for being offline, for example.

Adequate insurance cover for crypto has traditionally been hard to come by, and tended to be focused on two areas: commercial crime market – which covers things like cash in ATMs or moved around in armored cars – and the specie market, which is focused on specially designed vaults and the like, for storing high value items like gold bullion or art.

There has also been a lack of capacity when it comes to crypto risks, but that might be changing. Insurance broker Marsh recently announced an $850 million insurance offering covering cold storage, as well other custody solutions such as Multi-Party Computation (MPC), where cryptographic keys are split into shards.

Over the past several years, Relm has provided insurance cover to exchanges, payment and remittance platforms, custodians, software developers, and foundations that anchor decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) for some of the biggest decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, said the insurer’s CEO Joseph Ziolkowski, without naming any companies.

Ziolkowski said his new product suite applies to areas within crypto where there is a dearth of cover available and the capacity limits depends on each company and situation.

“If you look at the amount of capacity in London for something like cold storage, or specie cover, it's the most basic exposures arising from digital asset operations, and as a result, there's massive amounts of capacity that exists,” Ziolkowski said in an interview. “We deal with much more complex exposures that have far fewer markets that are willing to put their balance sheet on the line for these types of products.”