UTU – Trust Infrastructure

Enabling Defi

UTU trust paves the way to remove some of the burdens of over-collateralization and trustless-ness in the DeFi space. UTU’s trust infrastructure through the use of machine learning, social graphs and oracles can add a layer of trust that allows lenders and borrowers to get a better sense of which marketplace or service provider is contextually most trustworthy for them.

UTU Trust in DeFi: What we offer

UTU Trust Portal: Recommendations on third party oracles, DAPPs & Exchanges

UTU’s trust portal will act as a website application where users will endorse third-party oracles, DAPPs, or exchanges as trustworthy (or not), and other users can review such endorsements from users they trust. Specifically, the portal will enable lenders to decide which oracles and borrowers they trust to which degree, and therefore what amount of collateral and interest rate to require. In other words, this establishes a fully decentralized P2P reputation mechanism for creditworthiness. Endorsement data is also managed 100% on-chain and therefore is in itself trustless.

UTU Trust Oracles: Infrastructure to add an additional layer of a creditworthiness check to reduce over collateralization

A trust layer: UTU’s trust oracles can be used to assess a borrower’s creditworthiness, therefore removing the need for over-collateralization. The oracles access off-chain data through social media channels and other required data sources which UTU’s core algorithm then uses to determine the borrower’s creditworthiness and provide a recommendation.

Easy Integration with UTU

Our solution to solving the trust problem was to develop the UTU Trust Infrastructure as a Service (TIaaS), consisting of UTU’s proprietary Trust-API and UTU’s Trust Oracles that delivers our trusted recommendation engine and accesses users’ off-chain data securely.

The UTU TIaaS can easily be integrated into any application through our SDK and API ToolKit for Web and Mobile applications, allowing users to view UTU’s trusted recommendations for the relevant product/service. UTU’s Dev-team will also assist in integrating trust oracles and support the implementation process until deployment.

Why Back UTU?

A new paradigm of digital trust infrastructure

Personalized, contextualized, and designed to reward trustworthy actors

Global impact

Better trust means less transnational friction, happier customers, happier sellers, happier platforms.

Built in distribution and user base

UTU’s trust infrastructure already supports mobility and financial inclusion use cases across Africa, giving us direct distribution to a large scale user base.

Eliminate trust fraud

End manipulation and abuse of reviews, ratings, and scores

Hybrid business model drives users from centralized to decentralized

With partners across multiple sectors on-board with UTU around the world, we are seeding the foundations of a decentralized trust economy.

UTU Protocol

This will enable users to fully control and maintain their privacy using techniques such as zero-knowledge proofs, secure multiparty computation, differential privacy and k-anonymity.

UTU Videos

UTU First Principles

Flip The Economics of Trust

This is to reward the trust-building behaviors rather than manipulation or abuse.

A Person Is More Than a Number

We strive to give meaningful human-friendly personalized narrative and data points, not just opaque scores and aggregated ratings & reviews.

Human Centered

We focus on the foundation of human trust, relationships, as our foundation as well.

Context Is King

Our protocol considers real-world, real-time context factors connected through oracles to give our trust services situational awareness

Data Privacy/Control/Commercialization as a feature not a setting

Rather than bury privacy controls in settings, we are building UIs to empower users’ control of privacy as a core product feature and facilitate their ability to preserve privacy while earning from their data

Roadmap

Q3 2020

Conduct Token Sale
List UTU on an exchange
Release MVP of web application for the UTU Trust Portal for DeFi
Initialise research projects on decentralized trust with UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS)

Q4 2020

Prototype and implement auction/conversion mechanisms
Release MVP of UTU DeFi Oracle with pilot partners
Release MVP for the governance protocol
Evaluation and adaptation of tokenomic parameters based on simulations and tests

Q1 2021

Release MVPs of remaining components and products
First results from research projects with TAS
Extend support of UTU Credit Trust oracle for more sectors

Q2 2021

Upgrading all apps and smart contracts based on usage and feedback
Incorporate results from research projects with TAS
Integrations with more 3rd party services in more sectors
Trustless governance protocol release

Q3 2021

Prepare the first draft of publications with TAS
Evaluation and adaptation of tokenomic parameters based on research and more tests
Release of all major remaining components
Integrations with more 3rd party services in more sectors
Continuous improvements of smart contracts and applications based on learnings
Initialize follow-up research projects

Team

Jason Eisen

Founder & CEO

Obsessed with trust. Led strategy, design, and development of large-scale donor projects across multiple sectors in more than 40 countries, helping secure more than $3B in funding opportunities.

Ronald Mahondo

Founder & COO

12 years in the African private sector, including senior leadership roles in the technology, banking, and oil & gas sectors. Before joining UTU, he led two major mobility brands from 0 to profitability in Africa and managed annual budgets of up to $10M CAPEX and $100M OPEX.

Dr. Bastian Blankenburg

Founder & CTO

PhD on distributed AI utilizing multi-agent systems. He previously built and deployed large-scale transportation systems throughout Europe and the Middle East for a leading German transportation software company.

Dr. Alex Mwai

Head of Data Science

PhD in High Energy Nuclear Physics, Stony Brook. 10+ years’ experience applying AI/ML techniques, including on the largest particle collision datasets in the world.

Brian Muhia

Lead AI Engineer

Brings his expertise as a Linux guru and software engineer with strong mathematical and machine learning skills, in the fields of natural language processing and image recognition.