Brevis and USD8: Trustless Insurance for DeFi

2026-01-20

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TL;DR: Brevis is partnering with USD8, a stablecoin protocol with built-in DeFi insurance. USD8 users build “Cover Scores” based on their holding history, which determine payout eligibility when covered protocols experience losses. Brevis will compute these time-weighted average holdings using zero-knowledge proofs, making insurance payouts fully trustless and removing reliance on centralized infrastructure.

DeFi Insurance That Works Like Usage History

USD8 is a stablecoin designed around a simple premise: the more you use it, the more protection you get.

Users who hold USD8 or deposit into USD8-supported vaults accumulate a “Cover Score” based on their time-weighted average holdings. If a covered DeFi protocol suffers a hack or depeg event, users can claim from USD8’s Cover Pool proportional to their score. Payouts can reach up to 80% of covered positions.

The protocol operates through two tranches:

The Cover Pool offers higher yields generated through protocol-managed strategies over USD8 and its collateral, but assets may be deployed to cover losses.
The Protected Savings vault offers lower yields with positions insured by the Cover Pool.

Users choose their risk tolerance; the protocol handles the rest.

USD8 plans to launch coverage for major protocols including Aave, Curve, Lido, Sky, and others, with a beta targeted for Q2.

Why Insurance Payouts Need ZK Verification

The Cover Score is central to USD8’s design. It determines who gets paid and how much.

Without ZK verification, computing Cover Scores would require a centralized server with access to trigger payouts on-chain. The pipeline would look like:

user requests claim → centralized server calculates eligibility → server triggers on-chain distribution

Even users who interact directly with contracts would depend on that server to process their claims. This creates a single point of failure. If the server goes offline or the team disappears, users lose access to the insurance they’ve been building toward.

Vitalik Buterin calls this the “walk-away test”: can a protocol continue functioning if its creators vanish? For insurance, passing this test is essential. Users need confidence that their coverage will be honored regardless of what happens to the team behind it.

How Brevis Enables Trustless Payouts

Brevis ProverNet replaces the centralized server entirely.

When a user requests a claim, ProverNet computes their eligible time-weighted average holdings of USD8 and relevant derivative assets, generating a zero-knowledge proof that the Cover Score was calculated correctly from actual on-chain data. The result is submitted directly to USD8’s payout contract for verification and distribution.

No centralized server required, no trusted party determining eligibility, the proof itself guarantees correctness, and anyone can verify it independently. The entire payout pipeline becomes automated and trustless.

This approach also eliminates manipulation vectors. Cover Scores determine real money payouts, which creates incentive for gaming. ZK verification ensures that every score reflects genuine holding history rather than fabricated data.

Building Trustless Insurance Infrastructure

USD8 represents a new category for Brevis: protocols where trustless computation directly protects user funds. The same ZK verification that powers trading fee discounts and reward distributions can secure insurance payouts worth potentially millions.

As USD8 expands coverage to more protocols and the Cover Pool grows, the importance of trustless computation scales with it. Brevis and USD8 are collaborating on this infrastructure layer, with integration details to follow as the protocol approaches its beta launch in Q2 2026.

About Brevis

Brevis is a verifiable computing platform powered by zero-knowledge proofs, serving as the infinite compute layer for Web3. Applications can offload expensive computations off-chain while proving every result on-chain. The Brevis stack includes Pico zkVM for general-purpose computation, the ZK Data Coprocessor for trustless access to historical blockchain data, Pico Prism for real-time Ethereum block proving (99.6% coverage, 6.9s average), and ProverNet, a decentralized marketplace for ZK proof generation. To date, Brevis has generated hundreds of millions of proofs across 40+ protocols on 6 blockchains.