BlockTalks x UTU (Trust Infrastructure) AMA Transcript!
Hello! BlockTalkers & Blockchain Enthusiastic!
We recently hosted an AMA with UTU, on December 16th at 12.00 PM UTC. Many of you might have participated or many of not. But we make sure no one missed out from the knowledge shared by Jason Eisen, Founder & CEO & Bastian Blankenberg, Founder & CTO at UTU, so here we are up with the AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this blog post will be a saver & feeder of knowledge for them.
INTRODUCTION —
Jason Eisen, Founder & CEO — Well I’m Jason, I’m a serial entrepreneur. I grew up between Boston and Nashville. I spent 10 years in Washington DC, first at university at The American University (studied International Relations) then 7 years as a consultant for USAID, World Bank, and others. I started spending time in East Africa through that work in 2010 and moved to Kenya in 2013 to start (at the time) the first Taxi App anywhere in Africa, MARAMOJA. We realized in the process of building that taxi app that we were solving the wrong problem. we realized the problem was actually about Trust and began to focus our attention there, building better models of digital trust. This was really the birth of UTU.
Bastian Blankenberg, Founder & CTO — I studied and did a PhD in computer science/distributed AI. This involved multiagent systems using game theory, risk models, trust models etc. It also involved building payment protocols that incentivised agents to adhere to the protocol, before blockchain came along. So nowadays one would use smart contracts for some of this, and I find it exciting which possibilities for distributed systems are now available.
Later worked in industry, then moved to Kenya because of private reasons. Met Jason who convinced me to join his startup, the taxi app MARAMOJA because he had this great idea for a trust mechanism. That’s because the taxi sector had traditionally a lot of crime here, and people prefer known drivers. Then from that we spun off UTU, to offer the trust mechanism as its own product.
Introduction Questions Asked By Team BlockTalks
Q1. Could you please introduce UTU to our community in layman’s term?
Ans — UTU’s vision is to become the trust infrastructure of the entire internet, replacing anonymous star ratings, reviews, and scores as the de facto trust mechanisms of our digital lives. Our Mission is tor bridge the gap between how people trust in real life, and how they’re asked to trust online. We believe in privacy as a right and the need for a decentralized mechanism of trust to save the internet. :)
We provide what we call Trust Infrastructure as a Service (TIaaS) that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to constantly adapt to users’ unique preferences and context. This allows UTU to show people the most relevant validations for them as an individual for a given service in a given context. UTU has been deployed in the mobility, financial services, and other markets and is being developed with anchor partners across nearly every sector of the digital economy across the globe.
Q2. What are the advantages of UTU to other alternatives in the Blockchain field?
Ans — Blockchain provides a means to do trustless transactions — on chain. For anything that involves off-chain components, even if it’s e.g. just a UI to interact with a smart contract, people still have to trust those parts. And then of course there are a lot of use cases where parts of the transactions are also off-chain, e.g. under-collateralised lending.
perhaps not direct competition but there are always legacy solutions (mostly centralized) and often they even serve as the biggest manipulators of digital trust. Think about all the consumer review platforms out there and how badly we know they’re abused and manipulated by review farms, bots, and other bad actors.
Q3. What are the major milestones UTU achieved so far & what are in the future pipeline?
Ans — We’ve accomplished a lot already having built and deployed our service in the mobility sector and more recently in the fintech sector. We’ve attracted top tier global partners, including as the first African startup to get investment from SoftBank Group’s DeepCore as well as Zeroth AI and Aeternity Blockchain.
We’ve built a strong ecosystem of partners and clients around the world, covering most key sectors and are continuing to make announcements with a long list of companies with whom we’re working but have not yet announced.
On the technical side, we’ve restructured our API to make it easier integratable by all sorts of client platforms from different sectors and we’re working on SDKs to make this even easier. We have also released the 1st version of our DeFi Portal app which is a sort of showcase, and will update it with advances as we release new API and SDK versions.
We have also just submitted a proposal for a research project in the context of the UK Trusted Autonomous Systems Hub, jointly with a number of their researchers. If successful, this will help us answer some of the trickier questions around modelling user preferences and the corresponding UIs.
We also recently got named as an industry partner for a Turing AI Fellowship and, Here’s a quick high level of our roadmap for the first half of 2021:
Q1 2021
Integrate UTU TIaaS with multiple pilot partners.
Improve upon the UTU DeFi Portal.
Initialize research projects on decentralized trust with UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS).
Q2 2021
Continue to integrate UTU TIaaS with more partners.
Release MVP for protocol governance
Evaluate and adapt tokenomic parameters based on simulations and tests.
Prototype and implement auction/conversion mechanisms
Even as the protocol components are delivered, our service operates in the centralized economy and continues to grow there.
Questions Asked on Twitter For UTU Team!
Q1. UTU Tokenomics is quite unique and may be difficult to compress in a short explanation but Can you explain the UTU Trust Token (UTT) and UTU Coin? its utility and features?
Ans — UTU Trust Token (UTT) measures the positive participation in the system. Trustworthiness is one aspect of this, which therefore should not be buyable, but can only be earned. Therefore UTT is really the heart of the protocol, but because it cannot be bought, it is not investable.
For the monetary aspects of the system, there is UTU Coin, which is a tradeable (ERC20 on Ethereum) token, and people are able to buy (and sell) it because it will be required for consuming our services.
Then, to further incentivise people to earn UTT, we want them to be able to convert it to UTU Coin to a limited extent. This will happen via an auction mechanism.
We are dedicated to the tokenization of trust. To create an economic model that optimizes the building of trust, we developed a two token ecosystem whose main purpose can be summarized as “Getting money out of trust,” meant both ways it could be interpreted. That is that one should NOT be able to buy digital trust but should be able to earn money from building trust.
Though there’s a complex game theoretical mechanism in place, the simplicity of these two high level objectives is what guide us and what we’d want people to take away.
Q2. In its development efforts, what does UTU think is the most proud of UTU? Could you please share more details about UTU’s development roadmap in the next 1–2 years?
Ans — I think the thing I’m most proud of is the team, partners, and community that have coalesced around a shared vision of a more trusted internet. I think the biggest step we’ve taken toward safeguarding that vision was the decision to decentralize the model and Bastian’s game theoretical brilliance to devise an economic model that solves for the economics of trust, beyond just delivering better trust technology.
On the technical side, I think the staked endorsement mechanism with its rewards and penalties, plus the auction conversion to UTU Coin, as outlined in the whitepaper, is really well designed. Of course it will have to prove itself in practive, but I think with some parameter tweaking this should work well.
I’m really looking forward to getting this released in production (currently alpha version on test net).
Q3. How UTU is building trust in DeFi portrays the problems that DeFi loans face with respect to overcollateralization, scams, and more? How your trust algorithms can improve credit scoring and trust in DeFi platforms?
Ans — The simple answer is: if you want to avoid overcollateralisation, you need some measure of trust. Because if the borrower defaults, there is some loss, even if you’re able to impose some penalties.
Traditional credit scoring looks only at past transaction histories. They might come from various places, but they’re only capturing a small part of the picture. For example, whether a farmer who borrows some money to buy seends for a particular plant for the first time will be successful, depends probably much more on their skill as farmer, whether that plant can grow well in the place where she is etc. than whether he paid back a loan for a car in time.
These kind of other parameters are what we call “context”, and our trust mechanism tries to evaluate that.
Q4. What are the ways that UTU generates profits/revenue to maintain your project and what is its revenue model ? How can it make benefit win-win to both investors and your project?
Ans — UTU’s business model is essentially infrastructure as a service, whether that’s a centralized platform/marketplace/ecommerce/site/app etc querying our API (and paying for that query) or a decentralized service paying in UTU coins to query us. By making it pay per query we ensure its accessible to all size platforms and services.
Q5. What are the main markets that UTU is focusing now? What is your marketing strategy to access to these markets?
Ans — We think about markets more based on sectors than on geographies given that our core offerings are tech infrastructure which can be geographically agnostic to some extent. We think a lot about sectors though, mostly based on risk. To us, trust is the key corollary to risk. The more risk I feel, the more trust I need. So what are the things we feel the most risk about as people? our health, family, home, business, and assets, if a digital transaction exposes any of these things to risk, its a transaction that we can dramatically improve with better trust.
Our focus at the moment is deploying the service directly with a number of anchor partners (some announced, some still secret) and then making the service readily available across all the major ecosystems where people build product.
Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session to UTU Team!!
Q1. DeFi project is very popular and there are many DeFi projects right now, what are your plans for now? what makes $UTU unique?
Ans — There are trust issues also in DeFi, with which our mechanism might help. Please see our concept note on DeFi:
Q2. After carefully assessing UTU Trust, i could see that your trust infrastructure could be useful in multiple sectors like hospitality, estate agents, delivering services, blockchain gaming and what have you. However, you seems not to be in a rush to Integrate it to all these aforementioned sectors. Why is this so? Won’t the implementation be successful if it’s done now?
Ans — We’re currently adapting our AI and ML components, which interpret a use case’s context and user preferences, to our pilot clients in specific sectors.I hope we will get to more sectors soon, but we have to take an iterative approach, as we’re developing the generally applicable solution as we go.
Q3. UTU Finance recently partnered with AmPnet. What were the reasons for this merger? How will AmPnet help improve and meet the goals UTU has set for itself?
Ans — this is HUGE! AmpNet is working with GreenPeace already. Integration of UTU’s trust infrastructure into AmpNet which is transforming the renewable energy investment , will be another level of game change.
Q4. There is more confidence when it comes from family and friends, so how does UTU work to give users confidence? Is it just a network of friends? Why is it more effective to use UTU to demonstrate confidence in a product rather than directly using a message via whatsapp or some social network? What is the advantage of UTU?
Ans — Family and friends, the people we know, are at the core of how we trust in real life, so UTU has put them also at the core of how we trust online — our social graph is indeed the heart of our tech. What’s powerful is the way we enrich that relationship graph with a lot of other information and streamline the experience of consuming that trust, at the right place, at the right time, with the right pieces of information from the right sources.
Q5. If the user provides UTU his data, he will enjoy a recommendation system based on relationships with either passive or active feedback. How does UTU protect the data of these users? Have you ever had a data leak?
Ans — Our core trust mechanism is built on a graph database (neo4j), for which we create a separate instance for each client platform. A user’s data is only used accross use cases if the user allows it.
Apart from that, our data management mechanism will allow users to store their data at a place they trust, as long as they can make it available to our service and other services on the platforms via standard interfaces. But of course to use their data, we will need to store it at least temporarily even then.
No, we haven’t had a breach. We’re following best practices, and are seeing to isolate data and components parts of the system as best as possible.
Q6. You have a plan for integrating some protocols, such as DEDIS Calypso and Recheck, with UTU. What is the mission of these integrations/supports? What should be expected when completed?
Ans — This is to implement our data access control and management mechanism. Please check the whitepaper for details:
Q7. Something interesting that I noticed while reading your web page, is that your work group is constituted ONLY BY MEN, why? don’t you think that by including women in your team, you can obtain better and greater benefits?
Ans — Yes this is an issue, we’re working on that. The majority of our junior devs are actually women, but we’re trying to hire women into senior roles currently.
Q8. After carefully assessing UTU Trust, i could see that your trust infrastructure could be useful in multiple sectors like hospitality, estate agents, delivering services, blockchain gaming and what have you. However, you seems not to be in a rush to Integrate it to all these aforementioned sectors. Why is this so? Won’t the implementation be successful if it’s done now?
Ans — we agree that our trust infrastructure has application across nearly every sector and indeed we have a pipeline of more than 60 companies across sectors and geographies waiting for access. The challenge for us is to understand the relevant context factors that affect trust in each sector. The consequences of a poorly developed model of trust are too big for us to rush this. We are committed to the best version of digital trust possible and will not compromise on that :)
Q9. Now, some project have policies for their ambassadors to create a contribution and attract recognition for the project! So the UTU team plans to implement policies and incentives for your ambassadors?
Ans — We announced an ambassador program just last week in fact, check our TG for details.
Here are some important links of UTU (Trust Infrastructure) 👇
🌎 Website: https://utu.io/
📱Twitter: https://twitter.com/utu_trust
📢 Telegram ANN: https://t.me/UTUProtocol
📢 Telegram: https://t.me/UTUtrust
🗄 Medium: https://medium.com/utu-trust
