When we started designing Project @Firelightfi , we ran head-first into a simple truth: in today’s DeFi, credible insurance has to start big. In an ideal world, insurance grows alongside a market from day one. That didn’t happen here—most DeFi cover protocols never hit escape velocity. The result: if you want to meaningfully cover giants like Aave or Lido, you need scale by default. It would’ve been great to insure Aave when it was tiny; we didn’t get that lucky. For context, modern financial insurance really matured from the 1970s onward, in lockstep with the modernization of capital markets. Derivatives made risk tradable and hedgeable; quant risk management (VaR, duration, scenarios) professionalized underwriting; catastrophe models turned tail risk into science; and ILS/cat bonds invited alternative capital into the risk stack. In traditional markets, products could scale with their ecosystems over decades. DeFi skipped that adolescence and went straight to “large-cap or bust.” That’s why we talk about the Risk Pool Paradox (a.k.a. Insurance Scale Paradox): a pool’s solvency and diversification improve non-linearly with size; below a threshold, volatility dominates and high-value risks are uneconomic to underwrite. Think of it as insurance’s version of Metcalfe’s Law—value compounds with TVL and premium flow. What does this mean for @Firelightfi? Scale isn’t a vanity metric; it’s the product. If Firelight isn’t big, it can’t credibly cover top protocols. So our roadmap is unapologetically scale-first: deep reserves, institutional capital, clear triggers, and portfolio diversification. Start big, stay disciplined, and make DeFi cover actually work.