Crypto's $2.5B Problem Has an Insurance-Shaped Solution — Meet Mintara Labs

XRPL Canada – February 2026

Season 8, Episode 1 of All About Blockchain — recorded live at Ripple's San Francisco office

The three trillion dollar opportunity in digital assets gets talked about constantly. The two billion dollar protection gap? Not so much.

That gap — the hacks, the depegs, the blind-signing disasters — is exactly what keeps institutional capital on the sidelines. It's also what Sree Sanakkayala, founder of Mintara Labs, is building to fix. In the Season 8 opener of Ripple's All About Blockchain podcast, Sree sat down with host Lauren Weymouth — Head of Ripple's University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI) — to walk through the problem, the pivot, and where crypto insurance goes from here.

For anyone building on XRPL — or watching the space closely from Canada — the conversation is worth paying attention to.

The Problem: Audits Aren't Enough

In 2025, more than $2.5 billion was lost to onchain hacks and exploits. The number that should give everyone pause: 92% of those protocols had been audited.

How does that happen? Sree explains it clearly. A huge amount of code in crypto is forked — developers take an existing smart contract, change a few variables, and redeploy it on a new chain. Sometimes they use the original audit report to claim their new deployment is "audited," without spending the $60K–$100K it would actually cost to audit the modified version. One misconfiguration. One overlooked variable. That's all it takes.

Then there's human error. The Bybit incident in early 2025 — a loss of over $1.5 billion — came down to blind signing: a transaction was approved without properly verifying what was being signed. Sree's analogy is blunt: it's like signing a contract without reading it.

And then there's address poisoning, a scam that exploits a habit most crypto users have: checking only the first and last few characters of a wallet address. Attackers generate lookalike addresses that match those characters exactly, with a completely different middle. If you don't check every single character, you send to the wrong place. Your funds are gone.

Despite all of this, only a small fraction of crypto holders — somewhere around 11% or less — carry any form of insurance on their holdings.

Who Is Sree Sanakkayala?

Sree's path to Mintara Labs started at University College London, where he completed an MEng in Computer Science with a focus on privacy-enhanced technologies — trusted execution environments, zero-knowledge proofs, and the infrastructure of private computation. He then spent time helping crypto companies navigate token compliance across jurisdictions, work that gave him a front-row seat to a recurring problem: retail depositors into onchain yield protocols were terrified of losing funds, and the fear was rational.

That observation sat in the background until the recent bull run brought crypto back into the mainstream. Sree saw a window: regulations were getting clearer, traditional funds were beginning to move onto crypto rails, and that meant the underlying infrastructure needed to be de-risked.

His first stop was a technical residency in Paris. His second was the BDAX accelerator at UC Berkeley, which he credits as a turning point. The program — mentored in part by lecturer Mark Surl — pushed him to talk to customers outside his existing circle, across new segments and types of institutions. The insights from those conversations fundamentally changed his go-to-market.

"The more I spoke with different customers, the more the product strategy became clear," Sree said. "I wouldn't have known any of this if I'd stayed in my head and treated it like a project."

One of Mintara Labs' early backers is Exponential Science, led by researchers from UCL — the same institution where Sree did his graduate work. The academic rigour that backing brings isn't just credibility. It shapes how the team approaches the problem: risk-first, not hype-first.

The Pivot: From DeFi Product to Regulated Insurance

When Sree first started building Mintara Labs, the product was crypto-native: smart contracts, onchain liquidity, tokenized risk. The idea was to use crypto to insure crypto.

The problem? The total available liquidity for underwriting is bounded by the size of the crypto market itself. And getting people to lock up capital to underwrite someone else's risk — in crypto, using crypto rails — is notoriously hard to scale.

After serving his first customers — small family offices, crypto-native companies, and high-net-worth retail investors earning yield onchain — Sree had sold over $12,000 in coverage and secured $20,000 in liquidity underwriting. But he hit the ceiling of that model. The architecture wasn't going to scale to the size of the problem.

The pitch shifted. Rather than a DeFi insurance protocol, Mintara Labs is now pursuing a regulated insurance product — one that works the way home insurance or car insurance works. You buy a policy. You pay a premium. If something goes wrong, you have legal recourse.

The target customer isn't just purely onchain DeFi users anymore. It's the growing category of crypto-native fintechs — companies transacting in real fiat, operating in the real world, but exposed to crypto-specific risks that traditional insurance products simply don't cover.

"The kind of security institutions actually want," Sree said, "is the ability to litigate if something goes wrong. A regulated insurance product gives them that. A smart contract doesn't."

By end of 2026, he's aiming for Mintara to be what Corgi or Delve are to compliance — YC-backed companies that found a clear niche in a regulated, under-served space and scaled it.

Why Traditional Insurers Haven't Filled the Gap

If the need is this obvious, why haven't the Alliances and Lloyd's of the world already moved in?

Sree's answer is precise: they don't have the data.

Traditional insurance is built on actuarial tables — centuries of claims data that let underwriters price risk accurately. Crypto is young. Many loss events go unreported. Regulatory classification of crypto assets as securities (or not) was unclear until recently, making it impossible to know which insurance frameworks even applied. And frankly, large insurers don't yet understand the taxonomy of crypto-specific risks well enough to build policies against them.

Sree has spoken with senior underwriters at some of the biggest insurance companies in the world. The common answer: this is huge money if it works — but it's too early. There's not sufficient claims data.

The path he sees playing out: smaller licensed insurers start writing crypto policies. Their claims data gets aggregated and purchased by mid-sized carriers. Eventually the large institutions have enough to move confidently. Lloyd's comes in. It mirrors how every new asset class eventually gets priced.

That data pipeline is exactly where Mintara Labs is positioning itself — and it opens a second revenue stream: selling proprietary risk data to the larger carriers who need it to eventually enter the space.

The Engine: Pricing Risk with AI

At the core of Mintara Labs is a proprietary off-chain pricing engine. It pulls onchain data, processes it offchain using the latest AI models, and outputs risk prices — the foundation for writing actual insurance policies.

The AI component isn't just automation. It enables Mintara to fetch and interpret data that was previously too difficult to extract or understand at scale. Even if Mintara never has the liquidity to underwrite Coinbase's risk directly, an Alliance or Lloyd's might — and they'll need this data to do it.

On the defense side, Sree points to the rise of AI-driven smart contract exploits — LLMs reading existing contracts, finding similarities to already-exploited code, and attacking them. He notes this is partly a temporary problem (the pool of vulnerable legacy contracts eventually gets exhausted) and partly solvable through real-time tooling: dashboards that flag when a protocol is running contracts similar to ones that have already been compromised. That early warning layer is on the roadmap.

Why XRPL

Mintara Labs built on the XRP Ledger's EVM sidechain — and Sree's reasoning connects directly to the infrastructure story that XRPL Canada covers closely.

The initial use case was testing whether risk could be separated from the underlying financial mechanism — a risk-trading tool where risk itself becomes a tradeable asset, the crypto equivalent of a credit default swap. XRPL's EVM compatibility made that possible without sacrificing interoperability: smart contracts written in Solidity can talk to other chains, positioning Mintara to serve hedge funds and institutions regardless of which chain they prefer.

XRP's native liquidity was another factor. Since XRP doesn't have native staking, Sree sees a natural fit: XRP holders could deposit their holdings into Mintara's smart contracts to earn yield by underwriting crypto risk — turning idle capital into productive liquidity.

The connection to the XRPL ecosystem goes deeper than the tech stack. Sree's first ever crypto hackathon was a Ripple event. The team noticed his work, encouraged him to join their Paris program, and that kicked off the chain — Paris residency, BDAX accelerator, the Ripple SF studio where this very podcast was recorded.

"I went from a non-XRP person to an XRP person," he said. That trajectory is exactly the kind of pathway Lauren Weymouth and UBRI are designed to create: from university, to hackathon, to accelerator, to funded company.

🇨🇦 What This Means for Canada

Canada's crypto insurance landscape is more developed than most people realize — and more fragmented than it should be.

In February 2026, the Canadian Bitcoin Consortium launched Blockchain Insurance Inc. under an Alberta licence — the first association-based captive insurer for digital asset businesses in Canada. It covers cyber, directors and officers, and product liability. It explicitly does not cover digital assets or crypto-specific risks.

That leaves the asset risk layer — smart contract exploits, blind signing events, address poisoning, protocol failures — uncovered for Canadian businesses and retail holders.

Bermuda-based Relm Insurance has the most sophisticated crypto-specific product set available, covering smart contract crime, smart contract failure liability, digital asset crime, and slashing coverage. But Relm is not licensed in Ontario. In 2022, FSRA explicitly warned consumers against using them. No licensed insurer in Canada appears to currently offer direct coverage for these risks.

Canada regulates insurance through a dual federal and provincial system. OSFI oversees solvency federally, but market conduct, licensing, and consumer protection are governed provincially. A federally incorporated insurer still has to comply with provincial regulations everywhere it operates. For a new and technically complex product category like crypto risk insurance, that layered structure adds meaningful friction to building something nationally accessible.

What Mintara is developing — a regulated insurance product priced by a proprietary risk engine — would directly address this. The claims data it generates is precisely what Canadian insurers and regulators currently lack.

Until the regulatory framework catches up and licensed products exist, crypto adoption at scale in Canada will remain constrained by risks that nobody is covering.

The Advice for Builders

Sree's parting advice to founders was direct: stop calling it a project.

"The moment you call it a project, the implication is it's a side hustle. A passion project." The shift to treating it as a business forces a different set of questions. Who is paying for this? What problem does it actually solve for them? Would they pay again?

GitHub, he pointed out, is a graveyard of projects built by developers who asked their professors and hackathon judges whether it was a good idea — not their potential customers. Real customer discovery means talking to people outside your immediate circle, across different segments, repeatedly. Every new conversation changes the product. Every changed product is closer to something people will actually pay for.

"If you go out and try to make money from it, that forces you to speak with people. And when you speak with people, you start thinking of it as a business."

Mintara Labs Is Hiring

Sree is actively looking for senior underwriters, actuaries, and risk professionals who know how to use data to price the unknown. Crypto experience is not required. If you understand how to turn risk into numbers — in any domain — Mintara wants to talk to you.

The company is funded, revenue-generating, and moving fast. Reach out to Sree Sanakkayala directly on LinkedIn.