Connecticut Crypto Law Bans a State Bitcoin Reserve as Texas Builds One

Hartford has called itself the insurance capital of the world for more than a century, and insurance is quietly one of the largest real-world-asset markets on earth. The clearest example is the catastrophe bond, an instrument that lets an insurer hand hurricane or earthquake risk to capital-market investors, who earn high yields and lose principal if the disaster hits. It is a market having a moment. Cat bond issuance set a record at $25.6 billion in 2025, and the outstanding market reached $63.9 billion by the end of the first quarter of 2026, according to the specialist tracker Artemis. Hartford carriers sit among the regular issuers. The surge is driven by climate: as disaster losses climb, insurers lean harder on capital markets for backup, and a 2025 report from AM Best and Guy Carpenter found that 35% of small and midsize U.S. insurers issued catastrophe bonds that year, up sharply from before.

That market is now moving on-chain. In April 2026, asset manager Schroders Capital and reinsurer Hannover Re closed what they described as the first live collateralized reinsurance transaction on a tokenized platform. Firms such as Oxbridge Re have begun issuing tokenized reinsurance securities outright, pitching reinsurance as one of the largest established real-world asset markets in the world. Strip the jargon and tokenizing a cat bond means recording the investor’s stake and its payout rules on a blockchain, so a slice of hurricane risk can settle and change hands the way a tokenized Treasury already does.