Reinsurance is the critical financial infrastructure nobody sees.

Reinsurance backs the policies that pay out after something as devastating as a hurricane, a cyberattack, a drought, a pipeline explosion, or policies that cover something as mundane as home or auto. Most people never think about it, which is exactly how it should work: quiet, dependable infrastructure that absorbs the shocks the rest of the financial system cannot. When it works as intended, capital is matched efficiently to risk and nobody outside the industry has reason to notice.

Re exists because we think that infrastructure deserves to be rebuilt: more open, more transparent, faster, and governed by the people who depend on it.

This post is about how it's governed: why that governance matters, how we've designed it, the role it plays in what we're trying to build, and the tokenomics behind it.

That model has served the world reasonably well. The major reinsurance houses are serious institutions with deep expertise, and the system still works. But the model was built for a world where capital, information, and contracts moved slowly—where the friction of opacity was a tolerable cost.

We don't live in that world anymore. Capital moves in seconds. Risk can be modeled in real time. Collateral can be attested onchain, continuously, for anyone to inspect. The tools now exist to run a reinsurance market that's genuinely transparent to everyone in it, every day, rather than only to regulators once a year in a filing.

But a transparent marketplace governed by a single corporate sponsor is still a closed institution. It has merely moved the opacity from the market to the owner. For this to work, at scale, over decades, the rules of the market need to be set by a broader community of participants.

Why now.

The infrastructure necessary to run an open, continuously transparent reinsurance market exists. Re has built it and put it to work. Collateral is attested onchain today. Capital and risk move at close to real time today. The marketplace runs.

What's left is the governance question. A market like this will remain truly open only if its rules are set in the open, by the people in it, and set early. Govern it as a closed system now and that's what it's likeliest to remain. Sharing that responsibility while the market is still taking shape is far easier than retrofitting it once everything has hardened.

In this case, "governance" means governing the framework that sits above those decisions: the rules under which participants (reinsurers, cedents, brokers, and capital providers) are admitted to the market, the standards they have to meet and keep meeting, the protocols for how the system upgrades itself, the way the shared resilience capital that backstops the system is structured, and the disclosure regime that keeps every decision visible and accountable. That full scope arrives in stages. What goes live first is deliberately narrow, and the broader market-level powers come online in later phases, as the system earns them.

Think of it the way Lloyd's works at its best, as a governed marketplace rather than one big insurer. The market sets the standards, committees apply them, and participants who don't meet those standards don't get access. The catch is that all of this happens behind closed doors, in a building in London, decided by a relatively small group of people. Re is building a more transparent, more programmable version of that layer, in which the rules are proposed onchain and voted on by KYC-verified participants who have staked into governance.

The design principles
we've built around.

We spent a long time on what makes decentralized governance credible in a serious financial setting. The goal was never a toy DAO. It had to be an institution that licensed carriers, professional underwriters, and capital providers will actually trust. Four principles shaped the design.

Why this matters
beyond Re.

The problems in reinsurance (closed standards, slow capital, fragile concentration) are not unique to reinsurance. They're shortcomings shared by a market that grew up in an era of slow information and costly intermediation. We're beginning with reinsurance because it is foundational: improvements at the reinsurance layer compound outward to every primary insurer built on top of it, with downstream benefits for the broader market.

A more transparent, diversified reinsurance market means more capacity at lower cost, more reliable coverage in places that have long been underserved, and faster claims when communities need them. It also means a financial system with fewer single points of failure, fewer moments when private capacity falls short and public balance sheets have to step in.

A first look at RE.

RE is the governance token of the Re Protocol. It exists so that the users of the market can set its rules. It carries no claim on Re's revenue, earnings, or insurance flows. Here's the shape of it.

The total supply is fixed at one billion RE, with no inflation and no perpetual emissions. Allocations are distributed across the ecosystem, investors and advisors, and core contributors.

Allocations vest over multi-year schedules, so that receiving RE entails a long-term stake in how the market develops.

RE is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. Voting happens onchain through a public governance portal, with proposal thresholds, quorum, voting windows, and delegation. Active participants can earn rewards for that work, but those rewards are for taking part, not a passive return on simply holding the token.

What comes next.

We'll share more about the governance design over the coming weeks: how staking and bonding work and what it means to put something at stake to take part, what each committee is responsible for and how people join one, and how the framework opens up in phases.

The first phase is about getting the foundations right: staking, protocol upgrades, technical permissions, standing up the committees, and the reporting standards that keep all of it visible. The market-level powers—like who gets admitted and how the shared resilience capital is governed—come after that, subject to protocol development, governance approvals, and applicable legal review.

Whether you're a reinsurer, a cedent, a capital provider, a broker, or anyone else who wants to see transparent market infrastructure get built, there's a place for you in governing it.

More coming soon.