From quote to payout,every step in the open.

Ankh writes term life in ten, twenty, and thirty-year forms, plus whole life. Issue ages run 18 through 75; the thirty-year term is available up to age 55, so every policy can complete its full term inside the mortality table.

The application asks for what actually moves the mathematics: age, sex, smoking status, and health class. Three classes are offered — preferred plus, preferred, and standard — multiplying baseline mortality by 0.85, 1.0, and 1.25 respectively. Smoking is the single largest rating factor at roughly 2.3× baseline mortality, and it is priced plainly rather than buried in a class name.

In this demonstration, underwriting is simplified-issue: your answers are taken at face value and the quote is instant. A production carrier partner would layer the usual evidence — prescription histories, industry databases, and paramedical exams above certain face amounts — on top of the same rating structure.

Premiums come from a mortality-based actuarial model, not a marketing table. Mortality follows Makeham’s law — a baseline hazard plus an exponential age term, calibrated to modern nonsmoker term rates. From that curve we compute the expected present value of the death benefit and of the premium stream, and set the net level premium so the two are equal at issue. A transparent expense load and a flat per-policy cost produce the gross premium; monthly payers use the industry-standard 8.75% modal factor.

Denomination changes exactly one input: the discount rate on reserves. Dollar reserves can be assumed to earn about 4% a year; reserves held in hard assets like bitcoin earn almost nothing natively, so we discount BTC, TON, and ZEC liabilities at 1%, ETH at 1.5%, and USDC at 3.5%. A lower discount rate means a future claim costs more today — which is why a bitcoin-denominated policy carries a higher premium per unit of face value than its dollar cousin. That is not a markup; it is the honest price of promising a hard asset decades from now, and it is the same approach used by existing BTC-denominated carriers.

Everything is priced in the denomination itself. A 2 BTC policy quotes a premium in BTC, and that premium never moves with the exchange rate.

Each policy is assigned its own deposit address on the relevant network — derived deterministically per policy and currency, the way an HD-wallet payment gateway would do it in production (think BTCPay with an xpub; here the derivation is a clearly labeled demo). Checkout shows the exact amount due in your denomination, the address, and a QR code. Confirmed payments post a receipt to your policy, and optionally to the on-chain registry.

Claims are where insurance either keeps its promise or reveals that it never intended to. Ankh mirrors the claim lifecycle on-chain through the ClaimsCouncil contract, so the process is enforced by code and observable by anyone — most importantly, by your beneficiaries.

To be plain about it: the on-chain flow mirrors and disciplines the claims process — it does not replace legal death verification. A licensed carrier partner would still satisfy the requirements of its jurisdiction; the chain makes sure nobody can quietly lose the paperwork.

You name beneficiaries at purchase with percentage allocations that must total exactly 100 — no ambiguity for a court to resolve later. Each beneficiary can optionally carry an on-chain payout address.

Crypto-denominated policies pay in kind: a 1 BTC benefit settles as 1 BTC to the recorded address, with no forced sale and no exchange-rate haircut at the worst possible moment. Beneficiaries without a wallet claim through a standard identity-verified process and choose how to receive the benefit. Dollar policies pay by wire or check, as they always have.

One consequence worth sitting with: the payout does not depend on anyone finding your keys. If the cold wallet is lost with you, the policy still pays — which makes a denominated policy the closest thing self-custody has to an estate plan.