Mr But ( host AMA )
Everyone is ready for today’s AMA , I would like to introduce briefly through today’s AMA which consists of 3 parts
👉 Part 1 : Basic Introduction of UTU project with Jason — CEO, Bastian Blankenburg — CTO and Rahul — Token Sale Manager of UTU protocol.
👉Part 2: Guests Jason — CEO, Bastian Blankenburg — CTO and Rahul — Token Sale Manager. will answer community questions. People can post questions (here)
👉Part 3: All members can ask anything directly about UTU protocol
In order not to lose time we will go to the first part
👉 Part 1 : Basic Introduction of UTU project with Jason — CEO, Bastian Blankenburg — CTO and Rahul — Token Sale Manager of UTU protocol.
Please invite guests to briefly introduce the project as well as about themselves to everyone here @UTUman @databu @Rahul_UTU
Rahul Srivatsa |UTU Token Sale & UTU Product Intelligence
I’m Rahul Srivatsa, Token Sale manager and Chief of Staff at UTU. Born in India, but grew up in Tanzania and have spent a good amount of time in Kenya. I have a Masters degree from Boston University in Economics and have previously worked with Bastian on the Tokenomics section of the white paper. Previously, I have also had experience in the consulting and research world and currently training to be a data scientist. I met Jason a few years ago in Kenya and was immediately convinced about what UTU can bring to the world! Been with them ever since!
Bastian Blankenburg | UTU
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 make its own product of the trust mechanism.
Jason Eisen |CEO @ututrust, Building trust infrastructure, Founder @mm_nrb, Nairobi
Sure. I’m Jason. I’m a serial entrepreneur. 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.
Rahul Srivatsa |UTU Token Sale & UTU Product Intelligence
Brief intro about our company:
UTU’s vision is to become the trust infrastructure of the entire internet. Our mission is to bridge the gap between how people trust in real life and how they are asked to trust online. We believe in a more human friendly internet, data as a human right, and the need to avoid digital trust dystopias as we’ve seen portrayed and played out in various contexts around the world. We provide trust infrastructure as a service to make the internet a safer more trusted place to gather, work, share, trade, etc
Mr But( host AMA )
I have a project specific question you’re willing to answer
What do you think about the unique strengths of UTU Protocol?
Jason Eisen |CEO @ututrust, Building trust infrastructure, Founder @mm_nrb, Nairobi
I think I can start on this one
Our greatest strength is our values. It keeps us focus on building for maximal trust and privacy, it stops us from making tradeoffs or compromises to our model in pursuit of money.
Our name even reminds us that we are a values based company — UTU means “humanity” in kiSwahili…this is who our tech is built to serve
Those values, when wielded by the brilliant engineers, economists, designers and others on our team, become a very powerful force
Mr But ( host AMA )
Thanks for the reply from the guests, we will continue to step through part II
Part 2: Guest Jason — CEO, Bastian Blankenburg — CTO and Rahul — Token Sale Manager. will answer community questions from the form
First question : UTU develops many products, which is an advantage when it can meet almost the needs of users. However, does developing many products make management difficult? How do you ensure the quality of all UTU products? @databu @Rahul_UTU @UTUman
Jason Eisen |CEO @ututrust, Building trust infrastructure, Founder @mm_nrb, Nairobi
I would argue that we actually only have one product, but that product takes many forms depending on the situation, use case, and context. Our one product is trust though we insist to serve it up as infrastructure, not as a consumer product.
Trust is a high level human emotion, that underlies almost everything we do, and is tightly correlated to risk
any time I feel risk, I want more trust. UTU is designed to provide this type of high level flexible architecture for trust in whatever form it may be needed across the many sectors and contexts we support
Bastian Blankenburg | UTU
Sure. On the technical side, we’re implementing supported use-cases one-by-one, looking for similarities to generalise the product as we go. This concerns both backends, ML models, but also frontends such as the SDK.
Rahul Srivatsa |UTU Token Sale & UTU Product Intelligence
UTU isn’t really developing many products. It is developing one product (trust infrastructure) with many different contexts — (DeFi, Hospitality, Fintech, Online Marketplaces etc). Think everywhere you currently have to rely on online reviews and online feedback, UTU’s trust infrastructure can be implemented on all these platforms once our algorithms gather enough contextual data to train and fine tune
Mr But ( host AMA )
Thanks to the enthusiastic responses from the guests we will move on to question 2 . What is the benefits of being a user of UTU P2P Data Marketplace?
Bastian Blankenburg | UTU
Basically it’s giving back users control over their data: in our system, users can specify which services are allowed to use a user’s data and under which conditions, including price. At the same time, it will allow users to make this data available via storage services which they trust. Because they can set prices, they can profit from providing their data in this way, rather than letting companies profit from it.
Hope that answers it 🙂
Mr But ( host AMA )
Thanks for the answer from @databu , we will continue with question 3 : I think you guys are doing very well! I just have a question related to the financial situation: Considering the bear market that has now lasted for some time, and might continue to do so for even longer; how is the UTU doing in terms of funding to be able to keep up the development of the product and introduce new partnerships for years to come?
Jason Eisen |CEO @ututrust, Building trust infrastructure, Founder @mm_nrb, Nairobi
UTU’s future is secure! We are building the foundations of this company for many years already since 2013 when we started the mobility business that now runs as a subsidiary of UTU. We get revenue from this business, as well as from selling our trust services in the centralized economy to platforms of all types, especially financial services. Unlike many other blockchain protocol, we have a large userbase and revenue base already. We’ve built our token model as a way to deeply enhance the trust and decentralization of our system, not just to earn some quick money. We are also backed by some of the biggest VCs in the world like SoftBank Group through their early stage AI fund, DeepCore Investments, among many others.
Mr But ( host AMA)
Thanks for the answer, we will continue with question 4 : What role does the young talent play for the development of the UTU project? Do you have any project to support young students from emerging countries like VietNam?
Bastian Blankenburg | UTU
Yes, and we’re planning to stay so. We’ve seen the advantage of having developers who understand the context of what they’re building well. And people in emerging countries tend to have less trustable insititutions available to them, which is why they tend to understand our model better.
In Kenya, we’re also often taking interns or hiring from organisations like AkiraChix who train young female engineers from under-privileged backgrounds, and I’m happy to connect other such orgs in other places as well.
Jason Eisen |CEO @ututrust, Building trust infrastructure, Founder @mm_nrb, Nairobi
We are a company built on young talent from emerging countries! The vast majority of our 45 person team are Kenyans, working from our Headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. After Kenya we have a significant presence in Nigeria. Through our experience going through the Zeroth AI Accelerator in Hong Kong, we met Hajime Hotte who runs large scale AI teams in Vietnam so we know that there is a ton of talent there that we are very excited to tap into in the near future. I encourage all folks here that believe in our mission and feel they have something to contribute, to reach out
Mr But( host AMA)
Thanks for the answers from the guests, we will get to the last question and conclude part II
Last question : ‘’ Which third parties are involved in the trust system developed by UTU, how is it completely secure and private? 🌼 What are the partners of UTU, where could we experience its technology in the near future?
Bastian Blankenburg | UTU
There are technical and business parts to this, I’ll take the tech one
Jason Eisen |CEO @ututrust, Building trust infrastructure, Founder @mm_nrb, Nairobi
I’ll take the business ones . UTU has a growing list of amazing partners — you can see a list of some of them here: https://telegra.ph/The-UTU-Crowdsale-beings-on-14-October-10-08
We are super excited about partners like Elrond whose tech will unleash UTU’s full potential also Bitlipa, Maple, Raven, and others that we’ll announce soon that will be building on UTU’s tech we’ll be announcing soon where people we be able to get their exclusive first chance to use UTU for DeFi!
Bastian Blankenburg | UTU
UTU Protocol is designed privacy-first, meaning that we generally give users the power to says which of their data might be used for what. For the on-chain parts, we’re working on integrating secure and decentralised data access management system Calypso, built by Dedis/EPFL. In the future, we’ll also support privacy requirements on endorsements, such as min. k-anonymity. We will use techniques such as ZK-proofs and MPC for that.
As for out centralised parts, we’re following best securiy standards and some more, like storing each plaform-client’s data in seaparate databases, only using data across use cases if we have the permission of users to do so.
Mr But ( host AMA )
After this answer we have finished part II. Thanks for the replies, we will continue with Part III : All members can ask anything directly about UTU protocol
Question : Judging by everything, UTU is more oriented to the African market, WILL YOU DISCOVER ASIAN COUNTRIES?
Jason Eisen |CEO @ututrust, Building trust infrastructure, Founder @mm_nrb, Nairobi
We are headquartered in Kenya but our trust infrastructure is built to serve the whole world. We are actually already working with an incredibly innovative blockchain lending company in Asia, called ShuttleOne. They operate in Vietnam significantly I believe. Our tech will be available there soon. We also have a waiting list of of more than 60 companies to access our tech across nearly all sectors in more than 20 countries on 6 continents. UTU is an African company built to serve the whole world.
Question : In terms of security, the basic algorithm of UTU, in addition to determining the creditworthiness of the borrower and providing a recommendation, is capable of obtaining and accessing the “private” and “confidential” data of users?
Bastian Blankenburg | UTU
We only use data that users allow us to use. But the protocol incentivises them to do so. In the end, each user has to decide for themselves how much they want to allow, and potentially earn from it by enabling better recommendations or generally feedback to others.
Question : Does UTU has a plan to collaborate with Playstore or Apple store or in some big companies for conducting a legit review to some applications with their platforms? Is this one of your future goal to make UTU more popular?
Bastian Blankenburg | UTU
We aspire to become the default trust and feedback provider for online platforms. Similarly to as it is normal for platforms to integrate a Paypal button, we want it to be normal to integrate UTU trusted recommendations.
Question : Could you give me 3 key points to convince me and other angel investors invest in UTU in long-term?
Jason Eisen |CEO @ututrust, Building trust infrastructure, Founder @mm_nrb, Nairobi
The way I see it, digital trust has three problems, we are solving all three.
1. Theory of trust — digital trust currently is basically a legacy of what Ebay gave us in the 90s when we were just buying some beanie babies or whatever and some aggregated, averaged, anonymous feedback was ehhh.. good enough. Meanwhile the whole internet as evolved around us and digital trust mechanisms have stagnated. We abandon this one size fits all model of a universal score card for trust, and instead seek a descriptive model of trust, filtered by our own networks of trust and evaluated dynamically based on the options available…you could think about it like best fit vs. highest rating
2. Delivery mechanism. Trust has been hitherto delivered as a product — either as a consumer-facing review platform (yelp, tripadvisor, google reviews, etc) or as an afterthought inside products (“let’s throw a 5 star system on it and call it a day”). But trust isn’t a product…its infrastructure. It should be delivered as such. We serve up our Trust Infrastructure via API/Oracle so platforms and marketplaces can consume them as infrastructure. This also eliminates that massive manipulation ability on consumer platforms where I can create limitless fake accounts/reviews.
3. Incentives around Digital Trust. All of the economic incentives around digital trust are for the abuse/manipulation thereof. Fake reviews, bot armies, they all manipulate trust and tend to yield rewards for those that buy (and sell) such services. Meanwhile, good projects/people that only focus on organic metrics might languish on the side. We designed our token model to address both sides — to eliminate the ability to “buy Trust” while creating a positive economic incentive to build trust — defined as facilitating good outcomes.
Question : Kindly explain more about your Tokenomics, Release Schedule and UTILITY, is it inflationary or deflationary?
Rahul Srivatsa |UTU Token Sale & UTU Product Intelligence
Our Tokenomics is quite unique and may be difficult to compress in a short explanation. We have a two token model: 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 should be 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.
You can read this information and information about our timeline in our whitepaper: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSn7d9BovABf8IxaK9uvvoUkRQKMMEsUqxvetEjovhq-F2Sw7czzbBV4Gghsoi1txn6ydSx3bqeAXst/pub
Question : — How reliable is it to follow the UTU Trust Portal’s recommendations on oracles and different exchanges? Who can vote on whether a project is trustworthy or not?- How easy is it to integrate UTU into applications? Do I need to have a high level of programming knowledge? Is it possible to integrate it into both Web and mobile apps?
Bastian Blankenburg | UTU
— In general our recommendation mechanism is subjective to the users’ social relationships; users choose who they choose to trust, and our mechanism aims to show the right information at the right time for that. For lending usecases, we have a bit of specicalised support however, which combines more classical, tx-based measurements with our social approach. Context can also often be well incorporated in specialised lending use-cases, e.g. for certain demographics or types of businesses.
- We’re providing an API and SDKs with ready-made UI elements for easy integration. If a dev can integrate e.g. Mapbox or Google Maps, they’ll be able to integrate UTU’s recommendations as well.
Mr But ( host AMA )
Thank you to the guests from UTU Protocol and everyone who joined the AMA meeting today at VIC GROUP
👉UTU project information
Official Website Link (https://protocol.utu.io/):
Official Announcement Channel (https://t.me/UTUProtocol):
Official Telegram Group (https://t.me/UTUtrust):
Official Twitter (http://twitter.com/utu_trust):
Official Medium: (https://link.medium.com/DFjukS5OZ9)
Any questions that have not been answered can join the above note group to get answers
😍😍😍😍😍AMA END 😍😍😍😍😍