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Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Risk, Reward, and Resilience: Building Insurance Primitives in DeFi
Insurance stands as one of finance's foundational primitives—an essential scaffold that undergirds every major market from commodities to credit. Since the 1600s, no vibrant financial ecosystem has thrived without a robust insurance mechanism: market participants demand quantifiable measures of risk before committing capital. Yet in decentralized finance(DeFi)'s first wave—lending, exchanges, derivatives—insurance remained an afterthought, implemented in rudimentary forms or absent altogether. As DeFi targets its next inflection point, embedding sophisticated, institution-grade insurance models will be critical to unlocking deep pools of capital and delivering enduring resilience. Modern insurance has a long history. In the 16th century, Gerolamo Cardano's early treatises on games of chance pioneered probabilistic thinking, framing uncertainty in mathematical terms (eventually he would give his name to today's blockchain). In the mid-17th century, an epochal correspondence between Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat laid the empirical bedrock for probability theory, transforming chance from mysticism into a quantifiable science. By the 19th century, Carl Friedrich Gauss's formalization of the normal distribution enabled statisticians to model deviations around an expected value systematically—a breakthrough instrumental to actuarial science. At the dawn of the 20th century, Louis Bachelier's seminal work on the random walk of asset prices presaged modern quantitative finance, informing everything from option pricing to risk management. Later in that century, Harry Markowitz's portfolio theory reframed diversification as a quantitative process, offering a rigorous framework for balancing risk and return. The Black-Scholes-Merton model further advanced the field by providing a tractable means to derive implied volatilities and price options—cornerstones of modern derivatives markets. In recent decades, innovators like Paul Embrechts and Philippe Artzner enriched risk theory with copula statistical models and coherent risk measures, enabling the systematic capture of extreme tail risks and systemic dependencies. Insurance requires four core prerequisites: diversified risk vectors, a risk premium exceeding capital costs, scalable pools of capital, and quantifiable exposures. DeFi clearly offers quantifiable hazards—protocol exploits, oracle manipulations, governance attacks—but challenges to insurability remain. Early DeFi insurance initiatives struggled with limited actuarial sophistication, untested capital structures, and prohibitive premiums driven by the high opportunity cost of capital. Moreover, DeFi's rapid innovation cycle creates a shifting threat landscape: vulnerabilities in one protocol seldom translate neatly to another, and the speed of code changes outpaces traditional underwriters' capacity to assess risk. Overcoming these obstacles will require next-generation insurance architectures that can adapt dynamically to evolving hazard profiles. High Price Insurance Capital At the heart of any insurance construct lies the cost of capital. DeFi insurance pools typically accept ETH, BTC, or stablecoins—assets that themselves generate on-chain yield via staking, lending, or liquidity provisions. Insurers must therefore offer returns above these native yields to attract underwriters, driving premiums upward. This results in a classic Catch-22: high premiums deter protocol teams, yet low capital costs undermine coverage capacity and solvent reserves. To break this impasse, market architects must tap alternative capital sources. Institutional investors—pension funds, endowments, hedge funds—possess vast pools of capital with long-term horizons. By designing insurance products aligned to these investors' risk-return benchmarks (e.g., structured tranches offering defined upside in exchange for taking first-loss positions), DeFi insurance constructs can achieve a sustainable cost of capital, balancing affordability with solvency. Jakob Bernoulli's law of large numbers underpins classical insurance: as policy counts grow, actual loss ratios converge toward expected values, enabling precise actuarial pricing. Mortality tables by Edmond Halley and Abraham de Moivre epitomize this principle, translating population statistics into dependable premiums. DeFi's nascent ecosystem, however, features only a finite—and often correlated—set of protocols. Catastrophic events such as multi-protocol oracle manipulations expose systemic dependencies that violate independence assumptions. Instead of relying solely on volume, DeFi insurance must employ layered diversification: reinsurance agreements across independent risk pools, capital tranching to allocate losses by seniority, and parametric triggers that automate coverage payouts based on on-chain metrics (e.g., price slippage thresholds, oracle deviation tolerances). Such architectures can approximate the smoothing benefits achieved by traditional insurers. Quantitative risk modeling in DeFi remains in its formative stages. With only a handful of years of historical data and immense heterogeneity across smart-contract platforms, extrapolating risk from one protocol to another carries significant uncertainty. Past exploits—on Venus, Bancor or Compound—yield forensic insights but limited predictive power for novel vulnerabilities in emerging protocols such as Aave v3 or Uniswap v4. Building robust DeFi risk frameworks demands hybrid approaches: integrating on-chain analytics for real-time exposure tracking, formal security verification of smart-contract code, oracles for external event validation, and comprehensive stress-tests against simulated attack vectors. Machine-learning models can augment these methods—clustering protocols by code patterns, transaction behaviors, or governance structures—yet must be guarded against overfitting sparse data. Collaborative risk consortia, where protocol teams and insurers share anonymized data on exploits and failure modes, could create a richer data foundation for next-generation models. At its current scale, DeFi beckons for a reliable insurance primitive. Embedding sophisticated, scalable insurance solutions will not only shield capital but also translate abstract hazards—flash loan attacks, governance exploits, oracle failures—into measurable financial exposures. By aligning product design with institutional risk appetites, leveraging layered diversification, and advancing quantitative risk models, a vibrant DeFi insurance market could unlock previously inaccessible capital pools. Such an ecosystem promises deeper liquidity, enhanced counterparty confidence, and broader participation—from family offices to sovereign wealth funds—transforming DeFi from an experimental frontier into a cornerstone of global finance. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
The Guardian
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
King Lear is a masterpiece – as told by Akira Kurosawa rather than Shakespeare
I have long had mixed feelings about King Lear. I admire its cosmic grandeur and sublime poetry but balk at its structural unwieldiness and dramatic implausibility: like Coleridge, I find the spectacle of Gloucester's suffering 'unendurable' and there is something gratuitously cruel about Edgar's refusal to reveal his identity to his father. I've never regretted omitting it from my book The 101 Greatest Plays yet I still remember a shocked head of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford greeting me with the words: 'I hear you've dropped Lear.' Whatever my personal doubts, the play has a mythic quality that has appealed to dramatists, composers and film-makers including our own Peter Brook, the Russian Grigori Kozintsev and the Japanese Akira Kurosawa whose Ran is enjoying a rerelease to mark its 40th anniversary. Seeing Ran again after all this time was an overwhelming experience. It would be absurd to say it is better than Lear but it addresses many of the problems I have with Shakespeare's play. The Gloucester subplot is excised and the opening scene makes total sense. Kurosawa sets the action in a 16th-century feudal Japan where Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai), a warrior-chief, divides his kingdom among his three sons, with the eldest first in rank. Where Shakespeare's Cordelia – whom the critic James Agate once dubbed 'gormless' – precipitates a crisis by her obdurate silence, Kurosawa has the youngest son, Subaro (Daisuke Ryu), raise perfectly rational objections to his father's scheme. He foresees that it will breed chaos (one of the meanings of the Japanese word 'Ran') for which he is promptly banished. Kurosawa's greatest innovation is in the character of Hidetora himself. Shakespeare's Lear is despotic and wilful but he is also a man 'more sinned against than sinning'. Hidetora, however, is guilty of barbaric cruelties for which he comes to pay a hideous price. One of the most moving scenes is Hidetora's encounter with his Buddhist daughter-in-law and her blind brother, whose eyes Hidetora himself had gouged out after murdering his father. The meeting takes place in a hovel where we are thankfully spared Poor Tom's wild capering: instead we see a 70-year-old warrior coming face to-face, quite literally, with the consequences of his brutal actions and afflicted by a shame and remorse that propel him towards madness. Part of the brilliance of Kurosawa's film is the way it incorporates Shakespearean motifs while expressing its own philosophy. You see this in the poetic final image where the blind brother, abandoned during the climactic battles, is seen tapping his way inexorably to the edge of a bleak precipice only to stop at the last second. This solitary figure seen against a darkening sky clearly expresses Kurosawa's view of the human condition. We are all poised on the edge of an abyss – for Kurosawa it was the prospect of nuclear proliferation, today it would be climate disaster – into which, if we are fortunate, we do not finally plunge. It is a measure of Shakespeare's power that he stimulates other artists. Edward Bond's play Lear, first seen at London's Royal Court in 1971 and all too rarely since, is not unlike Kurosawa's film in that it shows a society descending into chaos under the influence of an arbitrary ruler. Where Kurosawa's Hidetora is accompanied to the last by his Fool, Bond's Lear is shadowed by the ghost of a boy who once sheltered him. Bond also shows, even more explicitly, the Goya-like horrors of civil war and has powerful scenes that consciously echo Shakespeare. At one point Bond's Lear bends over the beautiful dead body of his cruel daughter, Fontinelle, and asks in bewilderment 'Where is the beast? The blood is still as a lake', which reminds us of Shakespeare's 'Then let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her heart'. But while Bond's play merits revival, its final gesture seems inadequate. Shakespeare ends with a tribute to human endurance, Kurosawa with a glimmer of salvation. Bond's play ends with Lear taking a shovel to destroy the protective wall he has built around his kingdom and being killed in the process. Bond argued that his play came to a positive conclusion in that 'I make the king accept moral responsibility for his actions' but I miss the verbal poetry of Shakespeare and the visual resonance of Kurosawa in Bond's final image. Intriguingly, King Lear has also attracted countless composers. Giuseppe Verdi ('It is a sublime subject that I adore') was fascinated by its father-daughter relationship. Benjamin Britten contemplated a Lear opera in the late 1940s, worked on an outline with Peter Pears and left behind a Penguin edition full of annotations. And, of the extant Lear operas, one by the German composer, Aribert Reimann, had a vigorous production at the London Coliseum in 1989. Andrew Clements wrote in Opera magazine that 'the score can register nothing between violent excess on the one hand and numbed desolation on the other', but my faded memory is of a work that had a brutal percussive power and bypassed modern attempts, in the wake of Peter Brook's 1962 stage production, to justify Goneril and Regan. If nothing else, the opera proved that Shakespeare's play, craggy, monumental and flawed as it may be, has proved a magnet for other artists. It has also, in Kurosawa's Ran, yielded one unquestioned masterpiece. Ran is in cinemas now. A four-disc collector's edition is released by StudioCanal on 21 July.
Yahoo
06-07-2025
- General
- Yahoo
'Posy pink' farmhouse dating back to 1558 on sale for £1.85 million
A Grade II-listed, Suffolk pink farmhouse, dating back to the 16th century, is up for sale for £1.85million. The historic seven-bedroom property, known as Barton Grange, is listed by estate agent Inigo. It spans almost 6,400 sq ft and sits on 17 acres of private grounds in the village of Worlingworth. Vaulted timber-framed room with long dining table, bookshelves, and overhead paper lanterns strung from the beams. (Image: Inigo) The farmhouse boasts a set of atmospheric reception rooms, which includes a vaulted barn. The private grounds feature wildflower meadows, formal planting, a partial moat, and a large industrial barn. The house's frontage, dating back to around 1558, has been preserved in a 'posy pink' shade, a nod to an age-old architectural tradition associated with Suffolk. Original features, such as bay windows and ovolo lintels to the ground-floor fireplaces, have been carefully maintained. Colourful kitchen with painted timber units, exposed beams and shelves filled with jars, bottles and cookbooks. (Image: Inigo) A renovation in the mid-20th century saw the addition of a lean-to from the left gable and a gabled porch. Under current ownership, the home's character has been enhanced with warm-toned materials, colours, and modern fittings. Three staircases lead to the upper level where the primary suite features double doors to a private balcony and an en suite with a matching clawfoot bath. The farmhouse also boasts an extensive library, a yoga room, and two sitting rooms with modern log-burning stoves fitted in period fireplaces. The grounds are 'versatile' and 'expansive', featuring a vegetable garden, a cut flower patch, a paddock, and an orchard. A pink-painted bathroom with roll-top bath, wood flooring and a wall of decorative plates. (Image: Inigo) A terraced spot, accessible from the dining room, provides a space for hosting and a shepherd's hut offers a secluded spot for relaxation. The industrial barn, with a footprint of more than 3,000 sq ft, could be transformed with the relevant planning permissions. The property is located near several Suffolk towns, with Framlingham around 20 minutes away by car, and Woodbridge and the Suffolk coastline slightly further afield. Aldeburgh, Southwold, and Walberswick are all about a 45-minute drive away. The property is also near several schools, including Framlingham College, Thomas Mills High School, Hartismere Secondary, and Worlingworth CofE Primary School. Diss station, about 24 minutes away by car, runs services to Liverpool Street in about 90 minutes. For information on this property, contact Inigo or visit Zoopla.
Times
30-06-2025
- Times
The Tudor way of death — drunken tumblings and dangerous dung carts
One day in August 1565 James Johnson got drunk. By early evening he was so intoxicated that he fell asleep in a Southwark alley. When he woke up 'barely possessed of a healthy and calm mind' he decided to empty his bowels in a ditch. Feeling light-headed, he fell into the filthy water, got tangled in his breeches and drowned. Johnson's unenviable fate was documented for posterity because Tudor law required any suspicious or sudden death to be investigated by a coroner. And so after his body was discovered this official (assisted by a jury of at least 12 trustworthy local men) examined his corpse and questioned witnesses about the circumstances of his death. Once the coroner reached a verdict (in this case, of 'misfortune') his report was sent into storage at Westminster where over the course of the 16th century it was joined by records relating to nearly 9,000 similarly unfortunate individuals.
The Sun
21-06-2025
- The Sun
We bought an abandoned Italian mansion for half of the asking price, it looks like a palace but there's a major downside
A COUPLE shared a glimpse into the abandoned Italian mansion they purchased for less than half the asking price. And while the stunning property was definitely a steal, they revealed one major downside to their plans. 2 TikTok user Jordan Kamelleri (@jordankamelleri) and his partner Emmanuele are no strangers to rennovating old buildings and transforming them into high-end properties. Their latest purchase is an "abandoned Italian palace" which hasn't been inhabited in 40 years. The couple have been documenting their rennovation work on the 14-bedroom space, amassing eight million views on one of their clips. "When I was younger, I would have dreamed of a place like this," Jordan told his followers, revealing that features such as the property's armoury immediately sold him. Now, the pair plan to convert the 16th-century Italian palace into a private residence, reports People. They have been working to renovate various properties together since 2018, eventually leading them to their most restoration yet. Their new estate was built sometime in the 1500s and has over 21,500 square feet of living space. With years of experience navigating Italy's real estate market, the couple were able to negotiate the purchase price down to roughly half the original listing. They revealed that they ultimately paid the equivalent of £557,000 for the property, plus additional fees and taxes. The pair are now focused on clearing out the vast spaces and salvaging what they can. However, the long-abandoned property comes with one major drawback. They revealed that they have had to deal with "decades of decay" in their efforts to do up the space. But there are significantly more pros than cons with this property, as well as being a steal with magnificent views of the Italian countryside, it remarkably also has functional plumbing. While the current plan is to convert the space into a private property, the couple are remaining flexible and allowing for the possibility of opening one wing to guests as a vacation rental. They added that they are also considering opening parts of the palace for events such as weddings. Saving for your first property is tough, but it is possible. Here are a few steps for first-time buyers. 1. Cut back on luxuries and start saving Consistent monthly saving is the best way to accumulate enough money to get on the ladder, for a deposit and purchase fees. To do this, you need to take a look at your monthly outgoings and think about what can be cut out - holidays, new clothes, weekly takeaway. Using a savings calculator can help you to establish how long you will need to save for a deposit. Based on your income, you can figure out a realistic amount to save each month. 2. Have a realistic property search Set a budget for the property price you would like to buy, and think realistically about the location and size of your property. While we all may want that house with a view or extra bedroom, can you afford it? 3. Research Help To Buy and Shared Ownership schemes The government has introduced a few ways to help first-time-buyers get on the property ladder and they're great for those on lower incomes or to buy a property in more expensive areas like London. 4. Consider buying with another person Investing with somebody else you know is a sure way to get onto the property ladder. You only need to save half the amount you would otherwise, so you can work towards getting your property sooner. You can invest with a friend, family or partner. Naturally, it is a big step and a huge commitment so be open and honest about what you expect from living together — if you haven't already. 5. Talk to a mortgage broker and get your documents in order A mortgage broker can tell you exactly how much you can borrow for a mortgage, what you will need to pay monthly and in upfront costs. The vast property has an array of indoor-outdoor spaces, a favourite feature for the couple. These include several verandas, loggias, and panoramic atriums offering exposure to the Italian sun throughout the day. TikTok users shared their thoughts on the stunning property in the comments section. "This has SO MUCH potential as not only a home but also a wedding venue," wrote one viewer. "I've never been so jealous in my entire life," said another impressed follower. "People are really out there living my dream," commented a third person.
