Lloyd’s of London, the three-century-old insurance marketplace, is backing digital asset protection policies arranged on the public Ethereum blockchain that can be paid for natively, on-chain using cryptocurrency, courtesy of Lloyd’s coverholder Evertas and smart contract insurance provider Nayms.

It wasn’t so long ago that any kind of cryptocurrency insurance cover was hard to come by. Aside from the efficiency benefits of paying for policies in crypto and using a blockchain to streamline intermediary-heavy paperwork, a Lloyd’s of London consortium of syndicates backing crypto-native, on-chain insurance shows how far the industry has progressed in the last couple of years.

“What we're enabling is for people using public blockchain infrastructure to interact with highly regulated, traditional, fiat-backed institutions in a way that is seamless,” said Evertas CEO J. Gdanski in an interview. “Whether it's to pay in USDC or native crypto, or to place policies completely on-chain with the blockchain helping coordinate between a broker, the insured, and the insurers, we think this is a seminal piece of infrastructure.”

Nayms, a digital marketplace where brokers and underwriters connect with crypto capital investment, is a play on Lloyd’s “Names,” the collection of individuals and corporations who underwrite the risks at the historic insurance market.

Evertas provides cover to custodians, exchanges and the bitcoin mining industry. Last year, Evertas acquired mining cover specialist Bitsure and began offering policy limits of up to $200 million per crypto mining location.

“The crypto native expertise we're bringing into the underwriting process gives us a thorough understanding of the risks that we underwrite,” the company's head of European underwriting, Nick Selby, in an interview. “It means we are highly explicit about what we will and won't cover, and we can pay insured claims faster than anybody else.”